Colleen Cabili
2 min read
Ford said it leaned too hard on artificial intelligence for vehicle quality control and has spent the past three years hiring 350 veteran engineers to fix the resulting problems, the company said this week.
Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said the company had misjudged what AI alone could deliver. "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 told reporters. Many of the company's most experienced engineers had left Ford before their knowledge could be used, BBC reported.
The automated quality systems Ford had increasingly leaned on were not delivering, COO Kumar Galhotra told Bloomberg. The returning specialists now lead troubleshooting sessions and have overhauled the AI tools to flag defects before components arrive on the assembly line, he said.
AI remains central to Ford's operations going forward, but the so-called "gray beard" engineers the company brought back are now putting their decades of experience to work mentoring junior employees and rebuilding the machine-learning systems that had previously underperformed. Poon said the company came to understand that improving its automated and AI-driven systems depended entirely on having the most seasoned people shape them.
The effort appears to be producing financial results. Declining warranty and recall expenses have added up to real money, CEO Jim Farley said, describing the cumulative savings as "literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost." The company's quality overhaul also earned it first place among mainstream automakers in this week's JD Power Initial Quality Survey, an achievement Ford had last reached sixteen years ago. That marks a dramatic climb from its position in the prior year's survey, when it sat tenth among mainstream brands and trailed the industry average.
The quality push comes as Ford continues a broader reorganization. The company merged its electric vehicle, digital, and design teams with its global industrial operations into a new unit called Product Creation and Industrialization, led by Galhotra, following the departure of EV chief Doug Field. That restructuring aimed to speed vehicle updates across 80% of Ford's North American lineup by volume by 2029.
Despite the JD Power win, Ford remains the most recalled automaker in the U.S. Galhotra described the recall figures as a trailing measure of quality rather than a current one, and argued that as vehicles built under the new approach make up a larger share of the fleet, the numbers should improve on their own.