Ford has rehired some of its workforce after relying on AI to take on the workload.
The BBC reports that Ford implemented on AI across various parts of its operations. In fact, Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer as of October 2023, said during a 2025 earnings call that the company was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system.” This included the launch of 900 AI-powered cameras in Ford’s plants “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions”, Galhotra said, per the outlet.
AI was also used for quality checks. However, its performance fell short of expectations, prompting Ford executives to rehire more than 300 “veteran” quality inspectors “who carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design,” notes the outlet.
Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, admitted that the engineers had left the company before their insights could be used to train the tech, contributing to its inability to match the engineers’ performance.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Poon said, according to the BBC. “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.”
“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 later added.
In addition to rehiring the engineers, Ford replaced many of its senior leaders in engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing. The decision was in line with its goal of “reaching best-in-class quality.”
“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 explained, according to the BBC.
The rehired engineers are also mentoring younger staff, notes the outlet.
