Qantas outsources its marketing. For now, AI means India

Read the list again, slowly: finance, procurement, people, marketing. That is how Qantas describes the first wave of its new Accenture deal. Marketing isn't grouped with product or strategy. It is grouped with accounts payable.

What happened

• The deal: Qantas announced a multi-year partnership with Accenture, internally called “Project iQ”. Around 850 head-office roles will go over the coming years.
• The first wave: finance, procurement, people and marketing, with the first changes in place by mid-2027.
• Where the work goes: mostly to Accenture teams in India, with some staying in Australia.
• The rationale: CEO Vanessa Hudson points to more than 1,000 legacy applications that were never designed to work together. The partnership is meant to accelerate the airline's use of AI, and the functions are to be reworked with automation and AI later.
• The people: Qantas says it will redeploy as many staff as possible. The Australian Services Union notes that in August Qantas said there were no plans to offshore Australian jobs.

The AI project starts with a flight to India

Sounds like AI transformation. It isn't, not yet. The order of operations is: move the work, then automate it at some point. That is classic outsourcing with an AI promise on top.

And it isn't even dumb. My rule of thumb: AI doesn't fix broken ways of working, it widens the cracks in the foundation. With more than 1,000 apps that don't talk to each other, you can't bolt an agent on top and hope. Qantas is paying someone who does clean-up at scale. The price: the knowledge of how the work actually gets done ends up living with the vendor.

Marketing goes where it looks like procurement

Here's what I find interesting: Accenture takes the marketing that can be briefed like a process. Producing assets, running campaigns, building reports, closing tickets. Whatever a company runs like procurement eventually gets treated like procurement. It moves to wherever it's cheaper.

My line has been the same for years: keep in-house what needs judgment, context and accountability. Positioning, budget allocation, customer data, steering every partner including AI, final approval. Send out what can be clearly briefed, measured and swapped. Qantas is drawing that line for itself right now. The question is whether your board draws it for you before you do.

The catch

If you outsource execution, you need people inside who can steer it. Those people often sit in exactly the teams being cut. Without clean briefs, brand rules and your own data, any provider, human or model, becomes a black box.

What I'd do now

• Split your task list into two columns. Judgment on the left (positioning, budget, approval), execution on the right (assets, reports, campaign setup). Be honest, with hours per week.
• Document the right column. Processes, brief templates, brand rules. What's documented, you can automate yourselves instead of having to hand it over.
• Make the left column visible. Show the board, with numbers, which marketing decisions moved revenue. Otherwise you'll be on the next list, right next to procurement.

Bottom line: If your marketing looks like a process, it will be sold off like one.