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Palantir is visibly expanding its business beyond government and defense towards media, advertising and marketing infrastructure. Several large companies now use Foundry as a data and orchestration layer for marketing, audience intelligence or automated workflows.
Adweek describes a number of such partnerships: Zeta Global, Stagwell, USA Today Co. and Fox News Digital each use Palantir in different parts of their data and production systems. For marketers, the key point is that Palantir is not primarily positioned as yet another generative model, but as a layer between company data, operational systems and various AI models.
Zeta rebuilds its Data Cloud on Palantir Foundry
Zeta Global and Palantir announced a strategic partnership in June 2026. Zeta's Data Cloud is to be rebuilt on Palantir Foundry; on top of it sits Zeta's AI layer Athena, which is designed to derive decisions and marketing actions from customer data.
Zeta explicitly names the goal as agentic marketing: company and customer data are to converge in a shared infrastructure so that decisions can be made in real time and campaigns can be activated faster. At the announcement, Zeta CEO David Steinberg said the partnership could generate more than 100 million US dollars in annual revenue for Zeta in the coming years.
This fits a broader trend. Scope3 has repositioned itself as Apostra and wants to coordinate media buying with AI agents. DeepIntent likewise bundles research, audience planning and campaign activation in one agent system.
Stagwell uses AI agents across existing marketing systems
Stagwell is also building an agentic marketing and media infrastructure with "The Machine" and "The Media Machine". The group names Palantir as one of its strategic technology partners.
The approach is notable because it is not meant to replace existing systems. Instead, briefings, creatives, performance data and media workflows are connected through an additional AI layer. According to Stagwell, the Media Machine integrates, among others, Google Marketing Platform, Meta, Microsoft and LinkedIn, TikTok and The Trade Desk.
For companies, the central question shifts: not only which model is used, but how data, governance, identities and activation are connected so that different models can work reliably at all.
USA Today wants to monetize audience data faster
Publishers are also using Palantir. In August, USA Today Co. said it was deploying Palantir's platform to merge audience data and use it to build more controllable first-party relationships for advertising, subscriptions and commerce. The move comes at a time when traditional search referrals are under pressure for publishers.
The partnership is, however, controversial. More than 800 unionized employees from several USA Today newsrooms called on the company to end the partnership. The NewsGuild cited, among other things, concerns about reader trust, data protection and Palantir's work for government security and immigration authorities. USA Today Co., by contrast, stated that editorial decisions remain independent and that the data is protected under existing privacy and contractual rules.
This very conflict shows that the next generation of marketing and audience systems is not just a technical question. Data access, governance and trust become part of the product decision. This is especially true when systems don't just analyze, but increasingly also trigger decisions and activations.
Infrastructure is becoming more important than the individual AI model
Palantir's current move shows a shift in AI marketing: the competition is increasingly about the layer that structures data, controls access and makes agents capable of acting. Companies can swap out individual models without rebuilding the entire data architecture.
For marketers, this means agentic marketing becomes less a question of individual chatbots and more an enterprise architecture for data, decision logic and activation. At the same time, the demands for transparency and measurability are rising – a topic that is already becoming visible with AI agents and bot traffic in attribution and retargeting.