Ford is bringing experienced engineers, including some of its former employees, back into the business after its artificial intelligence and automated quality systems failed to deliver the results it wanted. The company says bringing human expertise back into the fold is already paying off, helping Ford climb to the top spot among mainstream brands in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey while also reducing costs.
According to a Bloomberg report, the US carmaker has rehired around 350 veteran engineers over the past three years, including former employees and experts from supplier companies, after its AI-powered and automated quality systems failed to deliver the results it expected.
According to Ford executives, the company had relied too heavily on automation while overlooking decades of engineering expertise built up by employees who had worked across multiple vehicle generations.
Charles Poon, Ford's vice-president of vehicle hardware engineering, admitted the company had overestimated what AI could achieve on its own.
"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 told Bloomberg. He added that AI is "a fantastic tool", but "it's only as good as the information you use to train it".
Poon said Ford had not done enough to preserve the knowledge of its most experienced engineers before many of them left the company. As a result, the AI systems lacked the real-world expertise needed to spot potential issues early in the development process.
To address that gap, Ford brought back more than 350 veteran engineers. The returning specialists, referred to internally as "gray beard" engineers, are now mentoring younger employees, helping retrain AI tools and identifying quality problems before they reach the factory floor.
Ford's chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, said the company had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" without getting the desired results. He described the veteran engineers as being "at the heart" of Ford's turnaround strategy, leading mandatory quality reviews and helping shift the company from fixing problems after they appear to preventing them in the first place.
"We're moving from that find-and-fix mentality to preventing issues before they occur," Galhotra said. "Stop admiring the problem and start solving it."
Interestingly, the changes at Ford extend beyond vehicle hardware. The company said its software, manufacturing and supply-chain teams now work much more closely together to catch issues earlier in the development cycle. Ford has also created a dedicated 40-member software quality assurance team to improve software reliability before vehicles reach customers.
At the same time, Ford insists it is not abandoning AI. Instead, it is making the technology smarter by feeding it better data from experienced engineers. The company says it has added more than 100,000 AI-powered validation tests designed to identify edge cases and stress-test vehicle software under a wide range of conditions.
According to the company, these automated testing framework allows engineers to quickly revalidate software whenever late changes are made, ensuring problems are detected before vehicles are delivered.
