Qantas Cuts 850 Jobs in Seven-Year Accenture Outsourcing Deal

Qantas will cut about 850 corporate jobs, roughly 3% of its 28,000-strong Australian workforce, under a seven-year outsourcing partnership with Accenture, with most of the displaced work moving to Accenture teams based mainly in India, Bloomberg reported.

The first wave of cuts is expected by mid-2027 and will hit finance, procurement, human resources and marketing. In an all-staff email, Qantas Group CEO Vanessa Hudson framed the overhaul as a response to AI. "The scale and speed of change in technology and AI is something none of us has seen in our lifetime," she wrote, calling it "hard news for some."

Qantas said the airline currently runs on more than 1,000 legacy applications "never designed to work together," and that the Accenture partnership is about modernising the technology behind the business and operating more efficiently.

The carrier said it will consult affected employees and their union over the coming months and try to redeploy as many people as possible through retraining, reskilling and new roles in Australia, the ABC reported. Individual outcomes have not been determined. The announcement lands alongside offshoring and efficiency programs flagged this year at Woolworths, Officeworks, Telstra and National Australia Bank, and fits a pattern our Jobs tracker has logged across 119 stories in the last 90 days.