Ford has rehired over 350 veteran engineers over the past three years in an attempt to improve its AI tools, Bloomberg reported.
The US automotive giant has brought back what it calls “grey beard” engineers to teach younger staff and retrain its AI models after persistent quality control issues.
Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that: “Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it. Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles.”
Chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra added that these engineers were “at the heart” of the company’s turnaround efforts. They now run mandatory meetings to troubleshoot quality problems and have reprogramed the tools to avoid issues before they happen.
Ford’s increasing reliance on AI and automation has not brought about the desired results, Galhotra told reporters, while rehiring human engineers with technical expertise has.
Chief executive Jim Farley told Bloomberg TV that warrantee coverages have gone down, as have recall costs, leading to a tailwind of “literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars”.
The company acknowledged that following the growing trend of replacing employees with automated systems had not paid off.
“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,” Poon said. Eventually, the company realised that in order to enhance its automation and AI tools, they needed to be trained by “the most experienced individuals”, he added.
This decision has led to tangible improvements for the manufacturer. On Thursday, Ford was the highest ranked mass-market car company in JD Power’s 2026 US Initial Quality Survey, a bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car in the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis ranked more highly overall.
The car company said this was “an achievement 16 years in the making,” and attributed part of its success to the rehired engineers who “carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design”.
Ford is not the only major company to rethink its AI strategy in recent months. In May, Uber’s chief operating officer told the Rapid Response Podcast that he found AI spend was getting more difficult to justify as there was not a clear correlation between AI usage and feature development.
