Ford has been forced to rehire more than 300 veteran quality inspectors after its AI-driven checks failed to match the skills and experience of human workers, the company admitted this week.
The US carmaker had embraced artificial intelligence across parts of its operations, including quality control, hoping to cut costs and boost productivity – a promise that has driven Wall Street fervour around the technology. But Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on Wednesday that the automated systems did not live up to expectations.
“Ford rehires over 300 veteran engineers after AI quality checks fail to match human expertise.”
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” Poon said.
The company had deployed 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions”, chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told investors in an October earnings call. But the technology lacked the training and expertise of veteran technicians, many of whom had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve the systems.
“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,” Poon said.
Ford has since rehired those human workers to train its AI tools and mentor younger employees. “We recognised that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals,” Poon added, according to Bloomberg.
The admission comes as Ford celebrated its return to the top of the JD Power Initial Quality Study, a key industry benchmark, for the first time since 2010. In a press release marking the news, the company said “reaching best-in-class quality required a significant talent refresh”.
Ford boss Jim Farley had previously warned that “AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind” in an interview with author Walter Isaacson last June. Yet the company’s experience suggests that, at least in quality control, the technology still depends on the humans it was meant to replace.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Poon said.