Ford rehires veteran engineers after AI falls short on quality

Ford has revealed it hired hundreds of experienced engineers after discovering artificial intelligence (AI) alone wasn't enough to improve vehicle quality.

According to Bloomberg, the American automaker said it has hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years – many of them former Ford employees and supplier specialists – to help address long-running quality issues that have cost the company billions of dollars in warranty claims and recalls.

Rather than replacing experienced staff, Ford says AI now works alongside them, with the returning engineers helping retrain both younger employees and the company's automated quality systems.

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"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Ford vice president of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon told reporters.

"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."

Ford chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra said the company had become too reliant on automated quality systems.

"We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results," he said.

"We brought back technical specialists... they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."

According to Mr Poon, Ford initially believed feeding engineering requirements into AI systems would be enough to produce higher-quality vehicles.

"Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product," he said.

Instead, Ford found the systems lacked the decades of practical knowledge accumulated by experienced engineers, prompting the company to bring them back to train both staff and AI tools.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said the improved quality is already reducing warranty and recall costs, contributing "hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars" in savings as Ford targets US$1 billion (A$1.45 billion) in cost reductions this year.

Despite the improvement, Ford remains the most recalled automaker in the United States. However, Mr Galhotra described recalls as a "lagging indicator" and said the company expects them to decline as newer vehicles designed under its revised quality processes enter the market.

The admission is notable given Ford has been among the automakers aggressively rolling out AI across its manufacturing operations. Last year, the company said it had deployed around 900 AI-powered cameras across its factories to identify production defects and reduce supply disruptions.

Mr Farley has also previously predicted AI would replace many white-collar jobs, but Ford's latest experience suggests human expertise remains critical when it comes to building reliable vehicles.

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