Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short
Key takeaways
- Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short.
- 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.
Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short. A completed commercial truck rolls off the assembly line at Ford's Ohio Assembly Plant in Sheffield Lake, Ohio, US, on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. The Cabinet officials' trip through the Midwest comes as the White House confronts voter frustration about cost-of-living issues with midterm elections looming later this year that stand to tip the balance of power in Washington. Photographer: Dustin Franz/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Image Credits:Bloomberg / Getty Images Anthony Ha Mon, June 29, 2026 at 2:05 AM GMT+7 1 min read 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."