Zeller, the Australian fintech unicorn, launched point-of-sale software for retail and hospitality businesses that founder Ben Pfisterer says will ship capabilities in one- to two-week sprints - a cycle he attributes to building AI into product development from day one. The speed is a direct challenge to larger competitors like Square, Shopify, and Stripe, and it signals how AI-driven delivery models are compressing timelines that once stretched across quarters.
Shrinking product cycles with AI
Ten months ago Zeller shifted from using AI for assistance to embedding it throughout the entire project development process. Pfisterer said the foundational components of the new POS system took months to build, but equivalent work now gets designed and tested in roughly a week. "Some businesses might need a really good table mapping system for hospitality or a fantastic inventory management system in retail, those are big chunks of capability that should take months," he told Forbes Australia. "We've identified eight of them that we're going to do post launch, and we're hoping to get the meaningful part of it - design, built and tested - in one to two week chunks of time."
The company treats the POS release as a case study for how deeply AI for Product Development can change delivery velocity. Pfisterer said he expects the timelines will shrink further: "I'm sure we'll speak in a year and we'll laugh that it took one to two weeks. It'll be like, well, that's now happening in a day."
Cost and scale considerations
Pfisterer's efficiency claims arrive as large US businesses flag rising AI costs. Meta reportedly limited internal AI usage after an "exponential increase" in expenses, and Walmart also restricted employee AI tools to control spending. Pfisterer believes Zeller sits at a size where the economics make sense: smaller firms can't absorb the cost jumps, while huge incumbents struggle to deploy the technology efficiently.
"Most businesses just have to accept the fact that this is a cost centre they didn't have yesterday, one they're going to have to have," Pfisterer said. "They have to become more efficient with it, the opposite of people not using it is not acceptable."
Product-led competition and expansion
The new POS software pairs with Zeller's existing payment terminals, giving users a hardware-plus-software stack that rivals the incumbents. Customers who use both can access a pay-as-you-go payment scheme instead of the industry's standard monthly subscription, a move Pfisterer says cuts fixed costs for businesses. That hardware-software bundling is a direct swipe at the ecosystems Square, Shopify, and Stripe have built.
Zeller, valued above $1 billion after a Series B in 2022, launched in the UK in April and has already signed more than 1,000 British customers. It plans to enter European markets later this year. Pfisterer said AI has stretched the company's runway - it delayed the need for a Series C - but international expansion will require fresh capital. "We will be raising again, I suspect we'll start having conversations at the back end of this calendar year," he said.
Why this matters for Product Development
Zeller's product cycle compression - from months to weeks - is a real-world benchmark for teams shifting AI from a sidekick tool to the backbone of development. Pfisterer's team is building, testing, and shipping feature-level capabilities in two-week sprints, not quarters. For product development leaders, the lesson is clear: the competitive gap isn't just about adding AI features; it's about rethinking delivery cadence itself. The companies that redesign their process around AI's speed will ship faster than those that simply automate existing workflows.
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