Three hundred and fifty. That is how many veteran engineers Ford says it has hired back after discovering that AI and automated systems could not deliver the quality it wanted. Some were former employees. Others had been working at suppliers.
Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer, told journalists, as Bloomberg reported, that the company had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” and that the results were disappointing. So Ford “brought back technical specialists”, he said, and those specialists “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, was blunt about the thinking behind the earlier approach. “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product,” he said.
Not a retreat from AI
The company is not dropping AI. The returning engineers, nicknamed the “gray beards”, are training younger staff and reprogramming the AI tools. For families who buy a Ford and depend on it every day, closer to home in the Philippines and across the region, that pairing of experience and software is the part that counts.
Ford says it is working. Chief executive Jim Farley credited the rehiring with lower warranty and recall costs, “contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.” The company also took the top spot among mainstream brands in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey, released the same week.
