Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short
Key takeaways
- Bloomberg reports the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results.
- To be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely.
- This rehiring seems to be paying off, with Ford anticipating that it will lead to $1 billion in reduced costs this year.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.
Bloomberg reports the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical specialists,” and those specialists “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, “Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product.”