Qantas to Move 850 Corporate Jobs to Accenture, Mostly in India, in AI Overhaul

In an internal email, chief executive Vanessa Hudson told staff that the first roles affected would be in finance, procurement, people and marketing, and that the changes would begin from the middle of 2027. The BBC, which saw the email, reported that the work would move "mostly" to India, with "some in Australia". Qantas said it would consult affected staff and unions before making final decisions and would redeploy people "where possible", including into new roles in Australia.

The deal is one of the clearest cases yet of a large Australian employer linking job cuts directly to AI and a systems overhaul. According to the Guardian, it is the third big corporate restructuring announced in Australia in three weeks, after National Australia Bank flagged 2,500 roles and Canva 1,200. Across the three companies, about 4,550 jobs have been targeted.

Qantas said the agreement would "modernise its back-end systems, processes and data, as it steps up investment in technology and AI". Hudson said the airline spends more than A$1 billion a year on technology and runs "more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together". She said Accenture would help redesign how corporate functions work and reduce duplication. The company said the work Accenture takes over would "in time" be "transformed further with automation and AI".

"The scale and speed of change in this space is unprecedented and unlike anything businesses have seen in generations," Hudson said. In her note to staff she wrote: "this is hard news for some and I'm sorry for the uncertainty it brings".

Qantas employs about 28,000 people in Australia and another 4,000 elsewhere, so the 850 roles are about 3% of its domestic workforce. The company said thousands of its staff already use AI in their daily work.

The plan has been in the works for months. In August, the trade publication B&T reported that Qantas was discussing moving up to 1,000 back-office roles to Accenture. At the time, the airline said it was in early-stage talks and had made no decisions.

The Guardian said the plan is likely to meet resistance from unions, which have fought earlier Qantas outsourcing decisions. The BBC said it had asked the Australian Services Union for comment.

The cuts come as the airline deals with higher jet fuel costs linked to the Iran conflict. In a market update last week, Qantas said demand remained resilient and flagged fare rises and capacity cuts. It has partly offset fuel costs by winning passengers who cancelled flights with carriers that stop over in the Middle East.

No roles will move until consultation with staff and unions is complete, and the first transfers are due by mid-2027.