Ford has rehired more than 300 veteran human engineers after AI failed to match their skills and experience in the automaker’s production process.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” said Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, according to BBC.

“Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles,” he added.

Poon said the manufacturer mistakenly thought that “introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements” it had would “produce a high quality product.”

BBC has more:

The US automaker is among many to have seized on the buzz around AI, particularly amid Wall Street fervour about the tech’s potential to increase margins.

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“AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind,” Ford boss Jim Farley said in an interview with author Walter Isaacson last June.

In an October earnings call, chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra said the firm was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system”.

This included rolling out 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions”, Galhotra told investors.

But Poon told reporters on Wednesday the firm’s AI-driven checks had failed to live up to expectations.

“We recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals,” Poon said, according to Fox Business.

In recent years, Ford has faced an unprecedented number of vehicle recalls.

The recalls have impacted millions of vehicles.

Fox Business shared further:

The Detroit giant said that it has hired about 300 veteran engineers to work in its vehicle engineering division in the last few years.

“Free from daily production schedules, these engineers now act as internal auditors, running mandatory weekly design reviews to hunt for and eliminate potential failure points before blueprints ever reach the factory floor,” Ford said in a release.

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Ford Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said that the experienced engineers and technical specialists were “at the heart” of the company’s efforts to improve production quality by addressing process issues before they’re incorporated into workflows.

Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg TV that the shift is helping improve the company’s financial performance, with spending on warranty coverage and recalls coming down, which in turn is boosting the automaker through cost reductions.

JD Power’s 2026 IQS not only placed Ford at the top of the list for the first time in 16 years, but it also ranked the Ford F-150, Ford Mustang and Ford Super Duty at the top of their respective segments for the second straight year.

 

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