Qantas to Cut 850 Corporate Jobs and Move Roles Offshore in Seven-Year Accenture Tech Outsourcing Deal

SYDNEY — Qantas Airways will cut about 850 corporate jobs and move much of the work to staff at consulting firm Accenture, mostly in India, under a long-term technology and outsourcing deal announced Tuesday as the airline pushes deeper into artificial intelligence.

Chief Executive Vanessa Hudson told employees in an all-staff email that the first changes are expected by mid-2027, with the rest to follow "over coming years." She described the announcement as hard news for some staff and said Qantas would redeploy as many affected employees as it can.

The cuts amount to roughly 3 percent of the airline's approximately 28,000 Australian employees and fall on head-office functions rather than flight crew, pilots or airport workers. The changes will start in the finance, procurement, people and marketing teams. Some of the services those teams deliver will move to Accenture, with the work done mostly by its teams in India and some in Australia, according to Hudson's email.

The agreement is a multi-year partnership that Qantas said will run for seven years. The airline said it will simplify its technology systems while it continues to invest about A$1 billion a year in technology, and that the services Accenture provides will be "transformed further with automation and AI."

Hudson framed the move as a response to rapid technological change. In a statement reported by Bloomberg, she said leading organizations worldwide are making strong progress in using technology and AI to transform how they work, and that "Standing still is not an option." In her email, she said Qantas, like every airline, runs on technology built up over decades, including "more than 1,000 legacy applications" never designed to work together. She said the new arrangement would let the airline innovate faster and speed up its use of AI.

Neither Qantas nor Accenture has said how many of the 850 roles will be replaced by automation rather than relocated, and Qantas has not given a savings figure for the deal. The airline also has not disclosed the contract's value.

The Australian Services Union, which represents many white-collar airline staff, said it was meeting with its Qantas members on Tuesday following the announcement. The union had not issued a detailed public response by the time the news broke.

The announcement lands at a sensitive moment for the airline and for Australian workplaces more broadly. Qantas is the country's flagship carrier and one of its best-known employers, and its handling of staff has drawn intense scrutiny in recent years. In 2020, during the pandemic, it outsourced the jobs of 1,820 ground handlers, baggage staff and cleaners. The Federal Court later found the move unlawful because it was designed in part to curb union bargaining power, a ruling the High Court upheld.

The consequences were costly. Qantas paid A$120 million into a compensation fund for the affected workers and was fined A$90 million in August 2025, the largest penalty of its kind in Australian corporate history. Hudson apologized to the 1,820 workers and their families. The court's findings concerned that earlier case, and nothing in Tuesday's announcement alleges the new arrangement is unlawful. But the history means any move to outsource jobs at Qantas is likely to face close attention from unions and the public.

The corporate roles at stake also differ from those in 2020. White-collar functions such as finance, procurement and marketing have been among the work that large companies globally have shifted to shared service centers in India and elsewhere, a trend that has accelerated as software and AI tools take over routine tasks. Accenture, a Dublin-incorporated consulting and technology services company, employs a large workforce in India and has built its business partly on running such operations for corporate clients.

Qantas's decision also comes as the airline manages other pressures. Last week it flagged fare increases and flight cuts as jet fuel prices surged, a reminder that the carrier is under cost pressure from several directions. Oil prices have since eased somewhat, according to Australian media reports, though they remain a key variable for airlines.

Hudson, who became Qantas's first female chief executive in 2023 after nearly three decades at the company, has spent her tenure trying to rebuild the airline's reputation following a series of customer-service and legal controversies. The new technology deal gives her a major cost and modernization initiative, but it also risks reopening questions about how the airline treats its workers.

For the affected staff, details remain thin. Qantas has not said how many of the 850 roles will go in each team or year, how many redundancies are expected as opposed to redeployments, or what support it will offer. It has said only that the redundancy plan will unfold over several years rather than all at once.

Analysts and unions will likely watch for several things in the coming weeks: whether Qantas provides a firmer timeline, how many people are redeployed within the company, and whether the Australian Services Union challenges the process. The Fair Work Act requires employers to consult staff on major workplace changes, and the union is expected to press the airline on its obligations.

Qantas shares were not immediately reported as moving on the news. For investors, the question is whether the deal produces the productivity gains the airline promises and how large any savings prove to be. For employees, it is a more immediate matter of whether their jobs are among the 850 that go.