Ford executives said they hired 350 veteran engineers (some of them were former employees, while others had worked for suppliers) after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired level of quality.
Bloomberg Reports The company’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, told reporters that Ford had been “relying increasingly on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical specialists” and those specialists “look for points of failure before a part reaches the plant.”
Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added: “We mistakenly thought that just introducing artificial intelligence and assimilating the design requirements we had would produce a high-quality product.”
To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is completely abandoning its AI plans. Instead, it is using rehired employees, known as “graybeard” engineers, to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.
This rehiring appears to be paying off, resulting in what Ford CEO Jim Farley says are things like lower warranty and recall costs, “contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of tailwind for Ford in terms of costs.” The automaker also claimed the top spot among major brands in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey released this week.
