Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Costs Billions
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- Ford rehired over 350 veteran engineers, internally dubbed "gray beards," over the past three years to lead quality reviews after AI-driven inspection systems produced costly errors.
- Kumar Galhotra, Ford's COO, conceded the company had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results."
- The AI quality failures cost Ford billions of dollars, per Bloomberg reporting cited by the article.
- J.D. Power's latest Initial Quality Survey ranked Ford #1 among mainstream brands — its first top finish in 16 years.
- Charles Poon, Ford's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, said AI is "only as good as the information you use to train it" and that the company undervalued its most experienced engineers.
- Ford remains the most recalled automaker in the US, though executives attributed those recalls to past automation issues rather than the recent rehiring.
Why it matters: For Ford's rehired 'gray beards,' the reversal is vindication — the automaker jumped to the top of J.D. Power's mainstream-brand rankings for the first time in 16 years. Ford insists it won't abandon AI, but now treats seasoned human oversight as a prerequisite for catching what its automated systems miss.
