Qantas will outsource 850 local corporate jobs to consulting giant Accenture, with most roles moving to India as the airline fast-tracks AI investment.
In an internal email to staff on Tuesday, the Australian company’s CEO Vanessa Hudson said: “This is hard news for some, and I’m sorry for the uncertainty it brings”.
The job cuts will begin mid-2027, she said, and start with finance, procurement, people and marketing roles shifting “mostly” to teams in India and “some in Australia” as the firm seeks to modernise its IT systems.
Hudson said the “scale and speed of change in technology, and AI is something none of us has seen in our lifetime”, and it was in talks with unions and staff on the plans.
The move comes days after the airline provided a market update, flagging fare increases and flight cuts amid higher fuel costs.
On its new multi-year deal with Accenture, Hudson said it aimed to “modernising” the airline’s IT systems and make them “more efficient”.
Qantas spends more than AU$1bn (US$691m; £514m) a year on technology, she said, and its back-end systems needed an upgrade.
“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 said.
The deal with Accenture means “we will redesign and simplify parts of how our corporate functions work and reduce duplication”, Hudson said, so staff can “spend more time on work that creates value for our customers and the business”.
The company said that “in time”, Accenture’s work will be “transformed further with automation and AI”.
The firm added that staff affected by the job cuts will be redeployed “where possible”, including into new roles in Australia.
Qantas, which employs about 28,000 staff in Australia and another 4,000 globally, said thousands of its staff already use AI in their daily work.
The BBC has contacted the Australian Services Union for comment.