8. Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE:ZETA)
Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (NYSE: ZETA) took the No. 8 spot after jumping sharply on Friday, with shares finishing at $22.89 as investor sentiment improved following bullish comments from Chief Executive Officer David Steinberg about the company’s artificial intelligence platform, Athena. While the listed gain in the ranking shows ZETA advancing 13.43 percent, the supplied story also notes that the stock increased by 24.90 percent on Friday, making it one of the more eye-catching high-volume AI-related stock movers of the session. Either way, the message from the market was clear: investors liked what they heard about Zeta’s AI-driven marketing platform and its growth potential.
Zeta Global is not the typical artificial intelligence stock that gets attention only because it mentions AI. The company’s pitch is more specific: it uses data, marketing technology, automation, and artificial intelligence to help companies improve customer engagement and advertising performance. In today’s market, that matters because businesses are under pressure to spend smarter, not just spend bigger. Marketing budgets are being measured more tightly, and platforms that can deliver higher return on marketing spend are becoming more attractive to enterprise clients. That is why Zeta’s Athena platform became the center of the investment story.
In a television interview, Steinberg said Athena “is winning in the marketplace,” pointing out that Zeta began working on artificial intelligence in 2017 and brought its AI platform live in 2020. That timeline gives the company an important talking point. Many companies are only now trying to rebrand themselves around AI, but Zeta is presenting itself as a business that has already been working with AI for several years. According to Steinberg, the company is now in its fourth year of more than 30 percent compounded growth on an average basis, which he directly linked to the strength of its AI platform.
The most attention-grabbing part of the statement was his comment that clients adopting Athena are seeing returns on marketing spend above 600 percent, while the company’s goal is to help clients reach 1,000 percent return on investment for every marketing dollar spent through the platform. For traders searching for AI stocks to watch, marketing technology stocks, high-growth software stocks, top Wall Street gainers, and companies benefiting from enterprise AI adoption, that kind of claim can immediately attract interest. It gives the market a simple and powerful story: Zeta is not only selling AI as a concept, but also tying it to measurable marketing returns.
The CEO also suggested that market turbulence may be encouraging faster adoption of Athena, as clients look for platforms that can help them achieve better results from their marketing budgets. That is an important point because difficult economic conditions can sometimes hurt advertising and marketing companies. But Zeta’s argument is that volatility could actually push companies toward smarter AI-powered marketing tools, especially if those tools can deliver better returns. That is likely why investors reacted strongly. The market saw Zeta not merely as a software name, but as a possible beneficiary of the broader shift toward AI-powered business optimization, data-driven advertising, and measurable enterprise technology spending.
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