Latest updates for ANZ sales professionals
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.
Meta is cutting 10% of its workforce: 8,000 redundancies plus 6,000 unfilled roles. The company is redirecting spend toward AI infrastructure and top-tier engineering talent. Cuts hit May 20, with marketing and ad ops teams particularly exposed as Meta automates advertising tools.
Meta is cutting 10% of its workforce (8,000 people) on May 20 and leaving 6,000 roles unfilled. The reason: capital investments of up to $135 billion in AI infrastructure for 2026. Sales teams at Meta, already hit by earlier cuts targeting advertising operations, face more uncertainty as the company trades headcount for compute power.
Four in five ANZ CFOs now manage responsibilities beyond finance, including sales operations, data analytics, and tech oversight. That creates risk when financial leaders lack sales expertise but control territory planning, quota setting, and revenue forecasting. The comp approval bottleneck is real.
A $60k/year enterprise marketing platform could not fix a broken unsubscribe link for 14 days. The customer shipped a working replacement using Claude and Replit in one afternoon. This is why legacy B2B software is losing deals to AI-first tools.
Kyle Parrish joined Figma at $2M ARR in 2018, built the enterprise motion from scratch, and scaled to 300 person team before IPO. The playbook: hire for stage alignment, win on value not price, and respect the community you are selling into. Base comp and hiring strategy included.