Qantas is redesigning the work behind the airline with AI built in

Every large organisation has a version of the same archaeology. A booking system from one decade, a finance platform from the next, a people system bolted on after a merger, and a layer of spreadsheets holding it all together. Qantas has put a number on its own: more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together. The airline's view is that connecting the data across them has to come before any serious use of AI, and it has signed a multi-year partnership with Accenture to do that work.

What the deal changes

Accenture will modernise the group's back-end systems, processes and data, invest upfront in its data platforms and redesign how parts of the corporate functions operate. Some of those services will move to Accenture, delivered mostly by its teams in India and some in Australia, and in time be transformed further with automation and AI. Around 850 roles are expected to be affected over the coming years, with the first wave of changes due by mid-2027. The Australian Services Union says that first wave covers finance, procurement, people and marketing. Its assistant national secretary, Scott Cowen, said the union had been told earlier in the year there was no plan to offshore jobs, and that "Qantas staff have the right to an explanation".

Group CEO Vanessa Hudson framed the decision as a redesign of work rather than a cost exercise. "That means fundamentally redesigning how the work behind our airline gets done, so it is simpler, more connected and keeps getting better, with automation and AI built in from the start," she said. She called the scale and speed of change unprecedented and said "standing still is not an option for us".

The promise inside the announcement

Two facts sit side by side in the plan, and they pull in different directions. Qantas spends more than $1 billion a year on technology, is growing a Product Innovation Centre in Adelaide to more than 400 roles and says thousands of employees already use AI tools in their daily work. At the same time, some of the corporate work those employees do is leaving the building. Hudson said the airline is focused on redeployment into other roles where possible, including new roles being created in Australia, "as well as on reskilling, retraining and ongoing support and care".

That sentence carries a lot of weight. Reskilling a procurement analyst into a role that does not yet have a job description is a very different task from teaching a team to use a chatbot. Somebody has to decide which skills transfer, which roles the redesigned functions will actually need and how long people have to get there before mid-2027 arrives. None of that is public yet, and it is the part a 28,000-strong Australian workforce will judge the programme on.

What this means for L&D

When the redesign of work is announced before the redesign of skills, L&D inherits the gap. The useful move is to get into the room early: map the tasks in finance, procurement, people and marketing that are changing, separate the ones that need judgement from the ones heading for automation, and build pathways people can start now rather than after their role changes. Tool training alone will not do that job, which is why our AI Training programs start from the workflow a team already runs rather than the software. For anyone watching this deal, the test of the reskilling promise is simple. How many of the 850 people affected can name the role they are training for?

Sources:

• iTnews, 10 November 2026: Qantas taps Accenture for major IT and data modernisation
• Qantas Group media release via The National Tribune, 10 November 2026: Qantas Group fast-tracks technology and AI investment with new Accenture partnership
• Information Age, 10 November 2026: Qantas to axe 850 jobs in AI overhaul