It was a morning commute Chris Greiner had made hundreds of times before. Living in old Shanghai and working in the city’s sleek business district, Greiner’s daily drive to the Jin Mao Tower often stretched well beyond an hour. But on this particular day, his driver told him they’d arrive in just 30 minutes. Puzzled but intrigued, Greiner went along—only to discover the traffic patterns had shifted. “They repainted the lines,” the driver told him with a grin. The same bridge, same road—just used differently.
Read MoreGreiner never forgot the lesson. As CFO of Zeta Global, he often draws from that experience when approaching business challenges. “You might be fixed in your infrastructure, but there’s almost always another way through,” he tells us.
That mindset is now shaping Zeta’s evolving AI strategy. Rather than applying AI for efficiency’s sake, Greiner and his team follow the real patterns of work—starting with customer behaviors. “We began by observing how marketers use our platform,” he says, “then built automations to eliminate keystrokes and surface next-best actions.”
Now, the finance function is adopting the same approach. Greiner’s team is analyzing daily tasks across accounting, FP&A, and sales operations to identify which can be codified and automated. Zeta is building agent-based workflows that transform data into actionable insights—at the push of a button.
“We’re letting the work show us where to go,” Greiner says. And like that rush-hour bridge in Shanghai, sometimes a better route is just a few new lines away.
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Q: Does the finance organization at Zeta look any different today than it did five years ago when you arrived?
Chris Greiner:
I’m a big believer that finance should serve as the single version of truth for the business. At Zeta, that means integrating not just finance and accounting, but also sales operations. From the outset, that was my vision—and it’s one I shared when I began speaking with our CEO, founder, and other members of the leadership team about joining the company. That foundational structure has largely remained intact from when I arrived to where we are today.
Q: So the structure stayed the same. Has there been any change in headcount or how your team spends its time?
Chris Greiner:
We’ve actually kept headcount flat, even as we’ve effectively tripled the size of the company. It’s not about simply adding people—it’s about changing the mix. I firmly believe that if I could have more data scientists in the finance and accounting function than financial analysts, we’d be a more advanced, more robust organization. So, we’ve intentionally brought in individuals with stronger engineering backgrounds—not just traditional accounting experience. Don’t get me wrong, we still have our fair share of CPAs, but our focus is on building a team that approaches finance with a data science mindset, rather than relying solely on conventional financial analysis.
Zeta Global | www.zetaglobal.com | New York, NY