Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Tech expertise on Australian boards has barely moved in 15 years. Less than 8% of ASX500 directors come from STEM backgrounds, compared to 80% from legal and finance. At current rates, board tech representation won't hit meaningful levels until 2078, per ASIC chair Joe Longo. That matters now: AI adoption is accelerating, and boards without data and tech advisors face liability risks.
Expedia is closing Lastminute.com.au on June 2, ending new bookings after 25 years. The move consolidates Expedia's ANZ portfolio under core brands, 12 years after acquiring the site in a $658 million deal for parent company Wotif. Impact on local sales teams unclear.
Revolut is pushing SME banking in Australia with merchant acquiring at 0.5% and business accounts, but won't say how many AEs they're hiring or what the comp looks like. The company has 1 million local users and claims A$250 million in fee savings, but sales team details remain opaque.
Anthropic reached $30 billion annualised revenue with roughly 5,000 employees, generating 6 to 10 times more revenue per head than Google did at the same scale. The AI company grew 30x in 15 months with no dedicated sales team, no CRO, and a research-heavy structure. OpenAI is running similar numbers: $24B revenue, 4,500 staff, doubling headcount to 8,000 by year end.
SaaStr's Jason Lemkin hasn't opened Canva in months despite being a happy customer for 8 years. The pattern: specialist AI tools like Reve, Opus Pro, and Higgsfield are eating specific use cases while team usage masks power user churn. When your most engaged champions quietly disengage, that is a leading indicator every B2B vendor should track.
The SaaStr.ai Index tracking 25 leading B2B software companies hit a 50.5% decline from October 2025 to April 2026. This is not a correction. The market has structurally re-rated software as an asset class, now trading below S&P 500 multiples for the first time ever. Two forces: AI capex displacing traditional software budgets, and substitution fear that agents will replace seat-based revenue models.
MYOB locked in a five-year Microsoft partnership to build AI agents for its 3.2 million ANZ customers, days after Xero announced its Anthropic deal. The collaboration funds joint development of agentic AI tools using Copilot Studio and Agent 365, targeting cashflow forecasting and compliance automation for SMEs.
Xero data shows 92% of Australian small businesses are running negative cashflow 4.2 months per year, with a 90-day crunch building from payday super reforms and 55-day collection periods. If you are selling to SMEs, your deals just got harder to close.
Sydney unicorn Canva acquired two local startups, Simtheory (AI collaboration) and Ortto (marketing automation), marking its sixth acquisition in 10 months. The $4 billion revenue company is repositioning from graphic design into enterprise workflows, customer data, and agentic AI. For sales teams, this means Canva is now building tools that compete with traditional sales enablement and marketing automation platforms.
Meta launched Muse Spark, an AI model designed to push product recommendations into social feeds across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The play: turn casual scrolling into commerce. For B2B sales teams, it signals another platform betting big on AI-driven discovery, though Meta's walled garden approach limits cross-platform prospecting.
The headline number is $122 billion. What hit the bank account on day one is closer to $37 billion. Amazon's $50B includes $35B contingent on IPO or AGI. Nvidia's $30B is compute credits, not cash. SoftBank's $30B arrives in tranches. The actual VC-style capital is $12 billion. If you are selling into enterprise AI, this structure matters: it signals how vendor partnerships are replacing traditional funding in late-stage AI deals.
OpenAI acquired TBPN, a daily live tech show run by former founders. The deal highlights a trend: profitable tech companies turning balance sheet cash into owned media channels. No financial terms disclosed, but TBPN projected $5M in 2025 ad revenue before the acquisition.