Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
Andreessen Horowitz carved out $1.7 billion from its $15 billion raise specifically for AI infrastructure investments. General Partner Jennifer Li is leading the bet, with portfolio companies including ElevenLabs (valued at $11 billion), OpenAI, and Cursor. The firm is rebuilding the entire tech stack: storage, compute, orchestration, and memory built for AI workloads, not cloud legacy.
One-third of Australian SMEs now use AI, but most are juggling chaotic piles of logins and half-adopted copilots instead of strategic workflows. The pitch: less AI, not more, might actually drive better outcomes for small sales teams drowning in subscriptions.
Real data from SaaStr: 2 human seats plus AI agents drove Salesforce spend from $12k to $22k annually. Same company stopped using Notion entirely. The pattern: agents pay for systems of record, ignore collaboration tools. This is what the shift to AI-driven GTM actually looks like in the budget.
Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth will announce a new forum bringing unions and employers together to manage AI's workforce impact. New government data shows filing clerks and keyboard operators are seeing slower growth, but graduate hiring remains steady. Translation: admin-heavy roles like SDR are in the crosshairs.
Gartner revised its 2026 software forecast up for the third time in six months. Total software spend now projected at $1.44 trillion, growing 15.1%. That is $190 billion in net new budget this year. If your company is growing slower than 15%, you are losing share.
Jason Lemkin's team now manages 20+ AI agents that outpace human Slack activity. The reality check: agents get lazy, fabricate excuses, and 60% solutions no longer get renewals. Plus a warning for sales tools: usage drop is the earliest churn signal you have.
Meta is cutting 8,000 employees while spending $115bn on AI. Microsoft is offering buyouts to 8,750 US workers while dropping $22bn per quarter on data centres. Analysts call it AI washing: using automation as cover for cost cuts that might not be about efficiency at all.
ServiceNow dropped 15% after beating revenue guidance. IBM fell 10%. Salesforce down 7%. The carnage hit every seat-based SaaS company, but infrastructure plays like Cloudflare and MongoDB are up 60% to 230% over 12 months. The market is repricing one specific business model: per-seat workflow software that agents can replace.
Thoma Bravo's $6.4B Medallia acquisition just became a total loss. Lenders including Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo took control after the company could not service $3B in debt against $200M earnings. This is the second major PE-backed SaaS equity wipeout in 18 months, and the list of similar deals at risk is long.
Enterprise software grabbed 52% of all VC funding in 2025, up from 29% average over the prior decade. Total enterprise software VC hit $263B, a 64% jump year-on-year. The top 20 deals claimed 41% of all funding, with 14 rounds over $1B, including OpenAI's $110B round.
ServiceNow posted Q1 subscription revenue of $3.67B (22% YoY growth), $1.67B free cash flow, and raised guidance. The stock dropped 13% after hours. Classic beat-and-lose: numbers shipped, market wanted more.
Fast-growing AI agent vendors are restricting Forward Deployed Engineers to enterprise accounts only, leaving mid-market customers with self-serve onboarding. The shift matters because deployment support is the single biggest variable in whether AI agents actually work. Zendesk data shows enterprise customers with FDE involvement hit 60-80% automation rates versus 20% for self-serve.