Ford has rehired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to fix quality problems its AI tools could not, the company told Bloomberg.
The "gray beards", many of them former staff or supplier veterans, were brought in to do two things the automation could not: retrain the AI systems on better data, and pass hard-won troubleshooting instincts to younger engineers. "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. Ford has since become the top mainstream brand in JD Power's latest Initial Quality Survey.
AI did not fail outright. It quietly eroded the senior expertise and the junior pipeline a company needs to make the AI work in the first place.