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 workers. The US carmaker, which had enthusiastically embraced AI across its operations in a bid to cut costs and boost productivity, admitted the technology fell short when it came to detecting defects.
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on Wednesday.
“Ford rehires over 300 veteran quality inspectors after AI systems fail to match human expertise.”
Poon said the company had not paid enough attention to the expertise of its most knowledgeable engineers before they left the firm. “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. Many of those veteran technicians had departed before their knowledge could be used to improve the AI tools.
Ford’s retreat from full automation marks a sharp reversal from its earlier ambitions. In an October earnings call, chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told investors the firm was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system” and had rolled out 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions”. Ford boss Jim Farley had also predicted last June that “AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind”.
But the technology failed to live up to expectations. Poon pointed to automated tools lacking the training and judgement of veteran technicians. The human workers who had left have now been rehired to both train the 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.
The admission of AI failings came as Ford announced it had returned to the top of the JD Power Initial Quality Study 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” – a process that involved replacing senior leaders.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Poon said. Ford’s experience suggests that, for now, the most valuable information still resides in the minds of the people who built the cars.