Ford has revealed it was forced to call veteran engineers out of retirement after AI failed to match their skills and expertise.
Over the past few years, the US carmaker has increasingly relied on artificial intelligence across its engineering and manufacturing operations, including for quality checks.
But it has admitted to rehiring more than 300 experienced engineers – nicknamed ‘gray beards’ – to help improve the reliability of its vehicles, according to Bloomberg.
‘Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,’ Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.
‘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.’
Last year, the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra said the firm was ‘deploying AI across the entire industrial system’.
But Mr Poon said the company has relied too heavily on automation – and that its AI-driven checks had failed to live up to expectations.
‘Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,’ he said.
Ford has revealed it was forced to call veteran engineers out of retirement after AI failed to match their skills and expertise
The veteran engineers now help train Ford’s AI systems as well as mentor younger engineers, Mr Poon explained.
‘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,’ he said.
The engineers now run meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen.
‘We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results,’ Mr Galhotra said.
‘We brought back technical specialists – they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.’
Ford’s confession that AI had fallen short came as it hailed its return to the top of one of the motor industry’s most closely watched quality rankings.
The company was named the highest-rated mainstream carmaker in the latest US JD Power Initial Quality Study – a title it had not held for 15 years.
Ford said the turnaround was driven by a ‘significant talent refresh’, including bringing back veteran engineers.
The move flies in the face of fears that artificial intelligence will replace experienced engineers.
Instead, Ford says the technology works best alongside decades of human experience rather than in place of it.
The company’s remarkable turnaround suggests that, for now at least, there’s still no substitute for seasoned experts.
A recent survey suggests that AI is actually going to make our jobs harder.
One in four UK employees claim tools like ChatGPT have in fact piled on more pressure – and made bosses expect them to do more.
Experts have warned it could ‘lead to burnout’, suggesting that because we are completing work more quickly we simply fill the time with new tasks instead.
