Ford has been forced to rehire more than 300 veteran quality inspectors after its artificial intelligence systems failed to match the skill and experience of human engineers, the company has admitted.
The US carmaker had embraced AI in a bid to cut costs and boost productivity, deploying the technology across operations including quality checks. But executives now acknowledge that the automated systems fell short. "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.
“Ford rehired over 300 veteran quality inspectors after AI-driven checks failed to match their expertise.”
The admission marks a reversal for a company that had championed AI's potential. Last June, Ford boss Jim Farley said in an interview with author Walter Isaacson that "AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind." In an October earnings call, chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told investors the firm was "deploying AI across the entire industrial system," including rolling out 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants "to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions."
But Poon acknowledged on Wednesday that AI-driven checks had not lived up to expectations. "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.
The root of the problem, according to Poon, was that automated tools lacked the training and expertise of veteran technicians—many of whom had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve the technology. "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 said.
Ford has since brought back those human workers to train its AI systems 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 said, according to Bloomberg.
The rehiring comes as Ford celebrates a return to the top of the JD Power Initial Quality Study—an industry benchmark it last topped in 2010. In a press release, the company said "reaching best-in-class quality required a significant talent refresh," which included replacing senior leaders.