Qantas will outsource 850 native company jobs to consulting big Accenture with most roles transferring to India because the airline fast-tracks AI funding.
In an inside electronic mail to employees on Tuesday, the Australian firm’s CEO Vanessa Hudson mentioned “that is laborious information for some and I am sorry for the uncertainty it brings”.
The job cuts will start mid-2027, she mentioned, and begin with finance, procurement, folks and advertising roles shifting “principally” to groups in India and “some in Australia” because the agency seeks to modernise its IT programs.
Hudson mentioned the “scale and pace of change in expertise and AI is one thing none of us has seen in our lifetime”, and it was in talks with unions and employees on the plans.
The transfer comes days after the airline supplied a market replace, flagging fare will increase and flight cuts amid larger gas prices.
On its new multi-year cope with Accenture, Hudson mentioned it was about “modernising” the airline’s IT programs to change into “extra environment friendly”.
Qantas spends greater than AU$1bn (US$691m; £514m) a 12 months on expertise, she mentioned, and the corporate’s back-end programs wanted to be upgraded.
“Like each airline, we run on expertise constructed up over many years for a distinct period, together with greater than 1,000 legacy functions that have been by no means designed to work collectively,” she mentioned.
The cope with Accenture means “we’ll redesign and simplify components of how our company capabilities work and scale back duplication”, Hudson mentioned, so employees can “spend extra time on work that creates worth for our clients and the enterprise”.
The corporate mentioned that “in time”, the work that Accenture takes over might be “reworked additional with automation and AI”.
Workers affected by the job cuts might be redeployed “the place attainable”, the agency added, together with new roles in Australia.
Qantas – which employs about 28,000 employees in Australia and one other 4,000 globally – mentioned hundreds of its employees already use AI of their day by day work.
The BBC has contacted the Australian Providers Union for remark.
