TL;DR
Ford rehired 350 engineers after AI failed to replicate veterans’ experience, and then reached JD Power’s No. 1 quality spot for the first time in 16 years.
Ford admitted it had to rehire experienced engineers after its artificial intelligence systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could change AI and still produce a high-quality product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, comes as Ford took first place among major brands in JD Power’s initial quality ranking for the first time in 16 years.
The problem wasn’t that AI was fundamentally broken, Poon explained, but that experienced workers left before they could transfer their institutional knowledge to the systems meant to replace them. Without decades of engineering judgment encoded in the training data, Ford’s automated tools amplified weak data rather than detecting design flaws. The company rehired, hired or promoted 350 experienced engineers to fill the gap.
Poon was vague about why those workers left, but the bigger picture is not. Ford has eliminated approximately 5,300 salaried positions since its employment peak in 2020part of a broader contraction among Detroit automakers that has eliminated more than 20,000 white-collar jobs. CEO Jim Farley has said publicly that AI “It’s going to literally replace half of all white-collar workers in the US,” A prediction that now complicates the quality crisis of his own company.
The 350 returning engineers were tasked with mentoring junior staff, rebuilding the data pipelines that feed Ford’s AI training, and refining the automated systems they were originally supposed to be replaced by. Ford also created a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to detect edge cases and revalidate software changes late in development.
The change was enough to push Ford to the top of JD Power’s 2026 Initial Quality Study, which measures problems reported by owners in the first 90 days of ownership. Ford had 152 problems per 100 vehicles, ahead of Nissan and Buick. The F-150, Mustang and Super Duty each earned top awards in their segment for the second year in a row.
Victory in quality does not erase a tougher record. Ford has led American automakers in vehicle recalls this year, issuing 51 so far in 2026, covering more than 11 million vehicles, more than double that of the next closest manufacturer. Also joins a growing list of companies finding that removing human judgment from AI-powered workflows creates problems that technology cannot solve alone.
The episode comes as AI companies and policymakers struggle to figure out what the transition means for workers. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and Microsoft endorsed RAISE US this weeka $500 million nonprofit led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to retrain American workers for the AI economy. Ford’s experience suggests that the most difficult problem is not retraining but knowing which workers it can’t afford to lose in the first place.
