Qantas Plans 850 Job Cuts in Accenture Technology Partnership

Qantas said the partnership is intended to help it modernize systems as it increases technology and artificial-intelligence investment alongside the largest fleet renewal in its history. The airline said working with Accenture would let it move faster and at greater scale than it could alone.

“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. Chief Executive Vanessa Hudson said the airline needed to reinvent its processes, platforms and data to innovate faster and improve the experience for customers and employees. She said Accenture had a global track record working with large organizations, including other airlines.

Tasks transferred to Accenture will be handled mostly by its teams in India and partly in Australia, Qantas said, and may later be further transformed through automation and AI. The airline employs about 28,000 people in Australia. Hudson said it would seek to redeploy affected workers to other roles across the group where possible.

Accenture last month reported higher quarterly revenue and gave a strong outlook for the year ahead, citing client demand for large-scale reinvention, often driven by AI.