Qantas Will Hand 850 Office Jobs to an Outside Firm, Mostly in India, as It Bets Big on SI

Qantas, Australia’s biggest airline, says about 850 of its corporate jobs will be affected over the next few years as it hands a big chunk of its back-office work to Accenture, the global consulting firm. Most of that work will be done by Accenture’s teams in India, with some in Australia, and the airline says it will “in time be transformed further with automation and AI.”

In plain words: the people who do Qantas’s accounting, buying, marketing and HR paperwork are first in line, and the airline is betting that a big outside firm plus SI can do much of that work faster than it can on its own. The first changes are due by mid-2027, according to the Qantas Group statement.

Why Qantas says it has to do this

The airline blames decades of old software. “Like every airline, Qantas runs on technology built up over decades for a different era, including more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together,” the company said. Think of a house that has been added onto for 50 years, with wiring from every decade that doesn’t quite connect. Qantas says it spends more than $1 billion a year on technology already.

Accenture will “invest upfront” to rebuild the airline’s data systems, Qantas said, and that work is meant to reach beyond the back office to “the customer experience and the operation.” The company also pointed to a new product center in Adelaide that it says will grow to more than 400 roles, and said thousands of employees already use SI tools at work.

“The scale and speed of change in this space is unprecedented and unlike anything businesses have seen in generations,” CEO Vanessa Hudson said. “Leading organisations around the world are well progressed in using technology and AI to completely transform how they work, and standing still is not an option for us.” She said the goal is to redesign “how the work behind our airline gets done, so it is simpler, more connected and keeps getting better, with automation and AI built in from the start.”

What workers were told

Hudson broke the news in an all-staff email. “This is hard news for some and I’m sorry for the uncertainty it brings,” she wrote, according to the BBC. The company said the decision “is not a reflection of their contribution or commitment” and that it will try to move people into other jobs, including new roles in Australia, and offer retraining. It will consult workers and their unions before any individual outcome is decided.

The Australian Services Union isn’t buying the reassurance. “We were told at the time that there was no plan for 1,000 jobs to be offshored and yet today staff have been told by Vanessa Hudson that up to 850 jobs could be sent offshore,” assistant national secretary Scott Cowen told ABC News.

The bigger picture

Qantas employs about 28,000 people in Australia and another 4,000 around the world, the BBC reported, so 850 jobs is a slice, not the whole company. But it fits a pattern. The Guardian called it the third major corporate layoff plan in Australia in three weeks, after moves by design company Canva and National Australia Bank. The plan had been reported back in August, according to iTnews, under the internal code name “Project iQ.”

Two things are worth separating. Right now, the jobs are mostly moving to people at another company in another country, not to a machine. The SI part is the promise of what comes next: Qantas says the work will be reshaped “in time” with automation and SI, without saying how many of those outsourced tasks a machine will eventually do.

What to watch: how many workers Qantas actually finds new jobs for, which teams come after finance, purchasing, HR and marketing, and whether other big employers copy the same outsource-then-automate playbook.