Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Employment Hero surveyed 2,600 workers and employers: 33% use AI at work without telling their boss, 75% report higher productivity, and 40% feel like they are cheating. Meanwhile, 44% of employers report staff using personal AI accounts with company data. The disconnect: workers are self-training on AI while businesses struggle to set policy.
Total B2B software spend is accelerating to $1.4T, growing 15% year over year, the fastest in a decade. At the same time, public SaaS companies are trading at a discount to the S&P 500 for the first time ever, with Monday, HubSpot, and Atlassian down 60% to 70%. The market has bifurcated: AI-native companies are tapping new budget and re-accelerating, while legacy SaaS runs the old playbook and waits for a recovery that is not coming.
Sarah Kennedy Ellis, Google Cloud's VP of Global Demand & Growth, shared how her team rebuilt their entire marketing workflow around AI agents. The result: 70% faster asset production and higher conversion rates, not lower. The catch: most teams fail because of workflow friction, not agent quality.
Blended churn metrics hide what is actually happening in your customer base. Break it by segment and you will see small customers churn at 3% monthly while enterprise retention hits 120%. Same number, completely different problems to solve.
Monaco, the AI-native revenue platform built by former Brex sales leader Sam Blond, closed a $50M Series B led by Benchmark. The company claims AI-driven outbound will push revenue per rep from 2x to 5x pre-AI levels within two years. Total funding now sits at $85M.
Over half of women leave tech before age 35, retention 45% lower than men. With women at 30% of the workforce versus 44% across professional roles, Australia cannot hit its 2030 target of 1.2 million tech workers without fixing systemic retention issues: pay gaps, harassment, and blocked advancement.
Victoria's startup agency LaunchVic is gone, folded into Breakthrough Victoria to form Innovation Victoria. The move comes as the state government cuts $4 billion from public spending. LaunchVic completed over 190 investments since 2017, focusing on early-stage and women-led startups.
Toast posted $6.5B ARR growing 22% while turning GAAP profitable for the first time. The restaurant POS company crossed 171,000 locations, added 7,000 net new in Q1, and has 40,000 using its AI agent platform weekly. Software margins hit 80%. Not slowing down.
Open USD launches 2026, backed by 140+ firms including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, and Shopify. Unlike Circle or Tether, reserve yields flow to partners, not a single issuer. Zero-cost minting targets payment companies and fintechs tired of high transaction fees.
Vercel automated lead qualification with an AI agent that costs $5,000 a year to run. The company reduced its SDR team from 10 people to 1.25, redeploying the rest into higher-value roles. COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser says it is a 32x ROI, and SDR quotas went up 30% that quarter.
Coinbase slashed AI costs in half while usage grew, shifting to open-source models. The move exposes what sales leaders are quietly facing: token spend quintupled in H1 2026, but nobody can show the revenue lift. Even top B2B companies are now questioning whether their AI investment justifies the cost.
Elias Torres walked away from Drift's $1.2B acquisition calling it a failure. The product got shut down, the team was let go, and the mission died. Now he is building Agency, an AI company targeting $1B revenue with fewer than 100 employees, 80% engineers, and no traditional sales org.