Ford executives said they hired 350 veteran engineers after their artificial intelligence and automation systems failed to deliver the level of quality they wanted. Some of them were former employees, while others worked for suppliers.
Bloomberg reports that the company’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, told reporters that Ford is “increasingly reliant on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back the technical experts,” who “locate failure points before the parts arrive on the factory floor.”
“We thought that just by incorporating artificial intelligence and accommodating the design requirements that we had, we could produce a high-quality product,” added 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, called “greybeard” engineers, to train younger employees and reprogram AI tools.
Those rehires appear to be paying off, with Ford CEO Jim Farley saying they’re lowering warranty and recall costs and “contributing to a tailwind of literally hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for Ford.” Hyundai Motors ranked first among mainstream brands in the JD Power initial quality survey released this week.
