Ford Motor Co. has rehired roughly 350 veteran engineers over the last three years to fix persistent quality problems that automated systems failed to resolve on their own, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The development comes as a rare instance of a major manufacturer reversing course on artificial intelligence in favour of human expertise.
The veteran engineers, many of them former Ford employees and others drawn from suppliers, were reportedly brought back to retrain younger staff and to reprogramme the AI tools that the automaker had relied on for quality checks.
The effort has paid off: Ford topped the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey among mainstream brands, a ranking it last held in 2010.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday, according to the outlet.
“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,” he added.
Ford Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said the returning specialists were “at the heart” of the company’s turnaround efforts, now running mandatory meetings to troubleshoot quality issues and reprogramming AI systems to catch problems before they reach the factory floor.
“We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems” without getting desired results, Galhotra said, adding that the veterans “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
The improvements are translating into financial gains, CEO Jim Farley said on Bloomberg TV.
“We’re seeing our warranty coverages come down. We’re seeing our recall costs come down,” he said, calling the savings “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.” The automaker is targeting $1 billion in cost cuts this year.
Poon acknowledged Ford’s earlier assumption had been flawed. “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,” he said, adding that the AI tools needed training from experienced engineers to function effectively.
Despite the gains, Ford remains the most recalled automaker in America, with Galhotra noting recalls are a “lagging indicator” expected to decline as preventive measures take hold.
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