Qantas is in early discussions with Accenture to potentially move up to 1,000 back-office roles in human resources, finance, and marketing to India, according to Australian Financial Review reporting confirmed by both companies on August 4, 2026. The airline is calling the effort “Project iQ,” pitched internally as an AI-driven modernisation program rather than a straightforward offshoring move.
A Qantas spokesperson pushed back on the offshoring framing directly: “We have been exploring partnerships that have the capability to support us and are in early-stage discussions with Accenture, but no formal agreement is in place, and no decisions have been made.”
CEO Vanessa Hudson has previously pushed back on framing AI purely as a cost-cutting tool, telling reporters: “I don’t put limits in terms of the way we’re thinking about AI, and I don’t think it’s the right thing to only think about the value that AI can give is through headcount reduction.”
That’s a notably different emphasis than what Project iQ looks like on paper: a proposal that, if it proceeds, moves roles rather than reduces them, just somewhere else. Whether that’s smarter tooling for existing Australian staff or the same work done from India at lower cost is exactly the question nobody at Qantas has answered yet.
Context matters a lot here. Qantas has been down this road before. A Federal Court ruling found the airline broke the law by outsourcing around 1,700 ground-crew jobs during the pandemic, a scandal that cost it heavily in penalties and reputation. A 2025 data breach traced to a Manila call centre has also kept offshore-operations security concerns alive inside the company. So when Qantas says “no decisions have been made,” HR watchers in both countries have reason to read that carefully rather than take it at face value.
The Australian Services Union isn’t reassured yet, but it’s also not raising alarms prematurely. Assistant national secretary Scott Cowen put it simply: “What matters is that Qantas has informed that there is no plan to offshore any Australian jobs.”
For India, this is the more interesting half of the story. If Project iQ proceeds even partially, it adds to a wave of global companies routing HR, finance, and marketing operations into India’s Global Capability Centre ecosystem, alongside airlines, banks, and retailers that have already set up shop in Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Pune. Accenture itself runs one of India’s largest employer footprints and has executed comparable deals before.
