Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. Our next guest in the software space Sue Kinder Syncassidy, CEO of the cloud based accounting software maker Zero Trades in Australia. So Kinder, welcome back. It's it's nice to have you back on here. We want to start with everything that's been going on over the past few days.
The concern that was really sparked by Anthropics Claude coming out with this tool that allowed legal analysis that for a long time was really the remit of specialized companies and it got this conversation started. Hey, some of these SaaS companies are really at risk. Some say because of what AI and AI tech can do, is your business at risk?
We think for us, AI is a net TAM expander, including the tools offered by many of the power power ms. Now the question is why, I think when you think about companies like Zero, we are the system of record. We are the collector of data for the SMBs who work with us. So it is not just about the software, it is about the data you provide. It is about your domain expertise in your vertical It is about your ability to take the power of these tools and translate
them for your customer, and your customer needs that. And of course it's about the trust privacy kind of layer that I would say the ninety nine percent of SMBs in the world who are not builders of technology will look to companies like zero to make accessible to them. So we see an opportunity for TAM expansion in our markets.
And when you say TAM expansion, you're talking about total addressable market, and when you talk about SMBs, you're talking about those small and medium sized businesses which you guys cater to.
Please go ahead, Yes, sorry, I sorry for the acronyms. And to your point, I think we see all of these powerful tools, including from the horizontal players technology we need to take advantage of, as well as building proprietary technology in order to make it understandable for the ninety nine percent of SMBs who don't go to work in the morning thinking I Am going to build text software. They're thinking about their business.
To be fair, I mean everybody that we talk about with this impact that we've seen on some of these SaaS companies, the software as the service companies, And we've talked with our own mandeep Seing of our Bloomberg Intelligence team, who says software is not dead, Like, you know, let's have some perspective at the same time in terms of the AI spend build an impact. In particular, we're early on in this game and this change and this disruption.
So is it fair to say that there is going to be some disruption that maybe some of what you do may be replaced by AI or some of these AI chat programs if you will.
You know, I think I would. I would say it differently. I think that AI technology is something we zero also take advantage of. So we're you know, building our vertical domain LMS on top of the powerful technologies coming out today because what our customer needs. Again, I'm going to come back to we're financial operations backbone for small businesses who ninety nine percent of the day don't wake up
think about technology or quite frankly, financial operations. They want to spend the majority of their time think about their business and for them, we need to be a forced multiplier. So think of us as a translation layer for that small business, taking advantage of both proprietary data and the power of these horizontal technologies.
So Zero stock slid close to sixteen percent in Wednesday's session in Australia, bounce back a little bit today up one point six percent. Yesterday's sell off as an overconcern, was that overdone?
You know? I think that the market right now is not distinguishing between the many types of software companies in the position they play with their customers. So I do think that the broad sell off does not really distinguish between the value propositions of different software companies. So for us, I mean, we did an investor briefing on Monday about how excited we are about using AI technology and being the layer that brings that to our customers with a
domain specific use case that can be multiplied. We think with the use of this technology.
You know, it's interesting and there was I think it is Financial Review where you gave an interview and they did a story on you guys just this week, and in a presentation to investors, you were cited as saying that you used anthropics, clode coding claud excuse me coding tools to try to clone Zero. Tell us about that, tell us about investor reaction and what are the questions you are getting from investors.
Sure, So, first of all, I mean I use all the tools. I think if you're a CEO in today's age, you know, use the tools, understand the power and the limitations of the tools today and how they're going to get more powerful. So when I used it, it was very easy to build a simple reconciliation. When I tried to do have multiple agents, they prompted me to go
build much of the technology Zero has. A good example would be, Hey, it's great that you gave me your bank statement, but I need you to be able to plug in multiple bank feeds. Well, of course that's the data layer I'm talking about at Zero. So I like using these tools because I think my job, our job is to understand the power of this technology and harness
it and not be afraid of it. Now, in terms of other questions, investors are asking us, look, we have had and continue to enjoy I think strong long term shareholder shareholders in Zero. I think when we gave the investor briefing on Monday, I think they were excited to hear us talk about our differentiators and excited to hear us quite frankly talk about AI adoption on our own platform. We use multiple lms behind Zero's own AI technology, we call it jacks, and we share with them the early
adoption figures on Zero. Three hundred thousand of our customers are already using ai JENAI features we launched within the last year, and of course over the last twenty years we've used traditional AI and have well over two million customers using traditional AI at Zero. Again, all you know, all harnessing the powerful technologies being built, you know, and so I think this is again very critical in understanding our position in the market.
So kinder, just in the last thirty seconds that we have with you, one of the reasons we like speaking with you is because you have these small and medium sized businesses all over as clients. What can you tell us just about the current health of their businesses and different areas of strength geographically in this economy.
Yeah, you know, Look, I would say small businesses are sharing, are showing durability in this economy. I'd say in the southern hemisphere where Zero was originated, Australia and New Zealand. You know, the last over the last year, our own data shows some final real time return to growth in
the US. You know you've a remarkably durable SNBAS. You know, despite tariffs, despite uncertainty, the optimism index by the NFIB remains at close to all time highs, so we would see we see durability in in the UK where we operate. You know, small businesses continue to need UH and get a lot of support from the government on issue. H m HM