Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Canva pushed back on reports that its Leonardo AI integration would trigger job losses. The company says it is not exploring redundancies as it folds the 150-person Sydney team into its AI roadmap. Worth noting: this comes as tech layoffs continue across ANZ, with AI integration often cited as the reason.
Afterpay parent Block is cutting 40% of its workforce, around 4,000 roles, citing AI productivity gains. CEO Jack Dorsey says most companies will follow. Shares surged 23% despite strong revenue growth. The move signals what could hit sales orgs across tech.
AI-native B2B startups are achieving $700k ARR per employee versus $610k for mature SaaS companies, driven by fundamentally different sales models. Traditional B2B vendors are loading up on CSMs while AI-natives deploy Forward Deployed Engineers. The gap is not just revenue efficiency: it is how these companies structure, scale, and compensate their go-to-market teams.
Stripe's 2026 annual letter reveals new startups are scaling dramatically faster, with companies hitting $10M ARR in 3 months doubling year over year. For sales teams, the competitive clock just reset: the startup founded 6 months ago might already match your ARR.
AI infrastructure spending is driving demand for electricians and construction workers as data centres expand across ANZ. Job ads for trades roles jumped sharply in 2025, tracking AI investment patterns. For once, the sales team is not invited.
Sydney-founded Canva reported $4B ARR with 35% YoY growth and $500M enterprise ARR doubling annually. The company employs roughly 5,000 globally but sales team size remains undisclosed. Current valuation sits at $42B in secondaries, with Figma and Adobe comps suggesting $20-48B range depending on market sentiment around AI risk.
The two firms that sell into enterprise IT and marketing budgets just reported Q4. Gartner revenue up 2%, consulting down 13%. Forrester down 8% full year, exiting strategy consulting, market cap collapsed to $105M. When the companies that track B2B spend are getting crushed, that tells you where enterprise buying cycles actually are.
Figma closed Q4 2025 at $304M in revenue, up 40% year-over-year, with full-year revenue of $1.056B. Net dollar retention hit 136%, meaning existing customers expanded their spend significantly. For sales teams watching SaaS benchmarks, these numbers set a new bar at scale.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is back on the Opposition frontbench as Shadow Minister for Small Business after being dumped from defence industry last year. Tim Wilson moves up to Shadow Treasurer. Price refused to apologise for the comments that got her demoted, but kept Taylor's backing.
Google now lets you mark preferred news sources, which surfaces human-written content over AI summaries in search results. The feature gives readers control over what they see and helps independent publishers compete with algorithmic content. Worth noting: it does not override ranking, but it does increase visibility when relevant.
MYOB is rolling out open banking across Business and AccountRight from March 1, with plans to make it the default bank connection by 2026. The move affects 1.2 million SME customers across ANZ and adds 50 new bank connection options. For sales teams selling into SMEs, this signals faster setup times and cleaner data feeds becoming table stakes in accounting software.
YouTube went down globally for 90 minutes on February 17, peaking at 340,000 user reports. The culprit: a failed recommendations system that knocked out the homepage, subscriptions, and search across YouTube, YouTube TV, and YouTube Music. Google fixed it by 8:04 PM PST.