Qantas Will Cut 850 Head Office Jobs and Hand the Work to Accenture, Mostly in India, to Fix 1,000 Old Apps

Qantas is sending a chunk of its head office to Accenture. The airline told staff on Tuesday that it will cut 850 corporate jobs under a new multi-year outsourcing deal, with much of the work moving to Accenture teams in India. Investors liked it: Qantas shares jumped 3.7% after the news.

"I know this is hard news for some, and I'm sorry for the uncertainty it brings," chief executive Vanessa Hudson wrote in an all-staff email. The first changes are due by mid-2027 and start in finance, procurement, people and marketing, with services "delivered mostly by its teams in India and some in Australia," according to the email.

The pitch: 1,000 apps that don't talk to each other

Hudson framed the deal as a technology fix. "Like every airline, we run on technology built up over decades for a different era, including more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together," she wrote. Qantas spends more than A$1 billion a year on technology, and it says the work Accenture takes over will "in time" be transformed further with automation and AI.

She also argued Qantas could not do it alone, because it "cannot hire at the pace this work needs" for data and AI skills. Accenture has more than 84,000 staff in India.

The airline employs about 28,000 people in Australia and 4,000 more abroad. It says it will redeploy affected staff where possible and consult them and their union over the coming months before deciding individual outcomes.

The union says it was told otherwise

The Australian Services Union is not buying the AI framing. It says Qantas told it directly earlier this year that there was no plan to offshore any jobs, a claim Qantas disputes. The plan, known internally as Project iQ, was first reported in August, and the union says it raised concerns about the Accenture talks at the time.

The timing adds to the pressure. Days ago Qantas flagged fare increases and flight cuts to cope with higher fuel costs, and the job plan is the third big corporate layoff announced in Australia in three weeks, after Canva and National Australia Bank.

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