Ford rehires more than 300 'veteran' engineers after AI quality checks failed to produce 'high-quality' products

UNITED STATES: Ford rehired more than 300 "veteran" engineers less than a year after chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra said in October that the company was "systemically deploying AI" across its entire industrial system.

The rollout included 900 AI-powered cameras across Ford's plants to "detect quality issues at the source" and help "mitigate supply disruptions," BBC reported.

The company’s admission of its AI failings also came just after its 16-year-in-the-making recognition as the top mainstream automaker in the JD Power 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study(IQS).

On Wednesday (June 25), Ford vice president of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon told Bloomberg the company had rehired retired quality inspectors after its AI-driven checks failed to live up to expectations.

"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” Mr Poon said as he pointed out that the tech lacked the training and expertise of veteran technicians who had left before their knowledge could help improve it.

“We recognised 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,” he added.

BBC reported veteran workers had since returned to help train the company's AI systems while mentoring younger workers.

The development also caught the attention of Singapore’s Senior Workforce Development and Skills Policy Advisor Ives Tay, who said in a LinkedIn post that perhaps the AI race may no longer be about who has the “biggest AI budgets”, but about who can “capture the wisdom of their most experienced people before it disappears.” /TISG

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