FORD REHIRED 300 VETERAN ENGINEERS AFTER AI FELL SHORT
Ford rehired veteran engineers after its AI tools fell short on quality, and an executive admitted the company got it wrong.
Ford said it brought back about 300 veteran engineers to its vehicle engineering division over the last few years, Fox Business reported on June 29, 2026.
The returning workers were hired after AI tools meant to help fix production quality problems didn’t deliver. Ford executives said the software lacked the training and expertise of veteran technicians.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” said Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, on a press call.
Poon was blunt about where the company went wrong. The BBC quoted him on the original plan: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.”
Why the AI missed
Some veteran technicians had left Ford before their knowledge could be used to improve the AI tools, executives said.
“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,” Poon said.
Ford also leaned on cameras. Kelley Blue Book reported that the automaker deployed 900 AI-assisted cameras to spot quality issues, but they couldn’t replace experienced technicians.
The fix was to put the veterans in charge of teaching the machines. “We recognized 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 said.
The BBC reported that Ford also brought experienced workers back to train systems and mentor younger workers.
What happened next
The headcount isn’t consistent across reports. Insurance Journal reported that Ford hired 350 veteran engineers over three years, including former employees and people from suppliers. It also reported that the engineers now run meetings to troubleshoot quality issues and have reprogrammed AI tools to prevent glitches.
Ford said the experienced engineers and technical specialists were “at the heart” of its efforts to improve production quality by addressing process issues before they enter workflows. That description came from Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer.
Ford said the rehires helped its quality push. Fox Business reported that Ford topped the J.D. Power 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study for the first time since 2010.
Ford hasn’t announced that it is dropping AI. Reporting described the technology as continuing alongside the experienced human workers.
According to a company release quoted by Fox Business, the returning engineers act as internal auditors. They hold mandatory weekly design reviews to find and eliminate potential failure points before blueprints reach the factory floor.
