Ford has admitted that its drive to replace human workers with artificial intelligence did not pay off — and has now rehired more than 300 “veteran” quality inspectors to fix the mess.
The US carmaker had adopted AI-powered cameras and automated checks across its operations, hoping to cut costs and boost productivity amid Wall Street fervour over the technology’s potential. Chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told investors in an October earnings call that the firm was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system”, including 900 cameras “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions”.
“Ford rehired over 300 veteran quality inspectors after AI quality checks failed to match their skill and experience.”
But the machines could not match the skill of the humans they replaced. “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, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.
Poon pointed to automated tools lacking the training and expertise of veteran technicians — many of whom, he said, had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve its tech. “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.
The veterans have now been brought back not only to train up the AI systems but also to mentor younger workers. “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.
Ford boss Jim Farley had foreshadowed the disruption, telling author Walter Isaacson last June: “AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind.” But the firm’s own experience suggests the opposite — at least for now. “Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Poon said.
The admission of AI failings came as Ford returned to the top of an industry benchmark for vehicle quality. It said it was the number one mainstream automaker in the US JD Power Initial Quality Study — a ranking it has not held since 2010. In a press release marking the news, the company said “reaching best-in-class quality required a significant talent refresh”, which involved replacing senior leaders.