Ford executives said they hired 350 experienced engineers — some of them former employees, while others worked at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver desired quality levels.
Bloomberg report The company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told reporters that Ford was “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical experts,” and those experts “look for failure points before a part reaches the plant floor.”
“Mistakenly we thought that just by introducing artificial intelligence and meeting the design requirements we had, that would create a higher quality product,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it is using rehired employees — known as “gray beard” engineers — to train younger employees and reprogram AI tools.
The realignment appears to be paying off, with Ford expecting it to reduce costs by $1 billion this year. The automaker also claimed the top spot among mainstream brands in the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey released this week.
