Ford thought AI could handle quality control. It was wrong. The automaker has rehired 350 veteran engineers after automated systems failed to deliver the quality the company needed.
Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists Ford had been leaning harder on automated quality tools with disappointing results. So they brought back technical specialists — the so-called “gray beard” engineers — to hunt for failure points before parts ever reached the plant floor.
Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, didn’t sugarcoat it: “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.”
Ford isn’t abandoning AI entirely. Instead, it’s using the rehired engineers to train younger staff and reprogram the automated tools. Early results look good. The company expects about $1 billion in cost savings this year from the move. It also claimed the top spot among mainstream brands in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey.
The lesson? Some problems still need experienced humans in the loop.
