Ford Rehires 350 Engineers After AI Fails To Preserve Expertise or Train Juniors
18 97After Ford's automated quality-control systems and AI tools fell short, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to mentor younger staff and reprogram the underperforming technology. "Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters on a call Wednesday. "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." Bloomberg reports: Those engineers were "at the heart" of Ford's efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they 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, Galhotra said. "We brought back technical specialists" and "they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."
The return of the veteran engineers at Ford cuts against the prevailing wisdom -- and fear -- that AI will replace all kinds of knowledge workers. But Ford found the machines couldn't replace experience. "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said. But "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."
As a result of the efforts of the old hands, Ford vaulted above quality stalwarts such as Toyota and Honda on JD Power's bellwether survey that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership. Only luxury brands Porsche and Genesis topped Ford this year.
18 comments
Re: Charles Poon (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Tomahawk ( 1343 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @03:46PM (#66210756)
Just like every other CEO that thinks AI is a magic bullet.
Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Insightful)
by MIPSPro ( 10156657 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:08PM (#66210340)
They actually thought that shit would work. They could just fire all those engineers and AI would just work itself out. Breathtaking hubris.
Re:Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Interesting)
by 0123456 ( 636235 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:20PM (#66210360)
The surprising part is that any of the engineers went back after the company had treated them like that. I guess they'll just be saving money until they get sacked again.
Re:Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward ( None ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:58PM (#66210444)
There's a good chance that the rehired engineers will be hoarding critical information from this point forward. Unethical, but they've been treated unethically preemptively.
Re:Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Insightful)
by khchung ( 462899 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @06:47PM (#66211058)
There's a good chance that the rehired engineers will be hoarding critical information from this point forward. Unethical, but they've been treated unethically preemptively.
Not just the rehired ones, EVERYONE in the company will be hoarding critical information and making it inaccessible to AI if they have any sense.
Re:Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Interesting)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:41PM (#66210614)
The surprising part is that any of the engineers went back after the company had treated them like that. I guess they'll just be saving money until they get sacked again.
What alternative do you think these guys had? They've got bills to pay and families to feed, and all of these companies have been dumping skilled employees like crazy due to leadership's sophomoric belief that AI can do everything.
This is certainly debatable, but (Score: 5, Insightful)
by pr0t0 ( 216378 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:41PM (#66210610)
It's not just about how to build the widget. I've long held that one of the most valuable assets an employee brings to his/her employer is their historical and institutional knowledge. Why all the various choices were made all along the way, where the skeletons are buried, and how to handle a specific vendor or customer to achieve the desired outcome often provide greater value than just how to tighten the nut on the bolt. A failure to recognize that is a failure of leadership.
Re:Shows you what they were thinking (Score: 5, Interesting)
by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @05:44PM (#66210994)
They are not super interested in thinking. Just in getting rich without effort, including mental effort.
Incidentally, I just saw a study that predicts that in 2028, LLM-code will be more expensive to get than code written by people. And that does not take insecurity, review-resistance, bad maintainability, loss of engineering skills and institutional knowledge, etc. into account. The whole thing is a massive hallucination by completely disconnected idiots.
GIGO (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:10PM (#66210342)
I hope Ford gave all those hapless engineers back pay for the whole time they were fired. (Hapless, because they took the offer to come back instead of finding an employer that properly valued their expertise and experience.)
It seems that the gestalt of the era is not just plain incompetence, but a complete disdain for competence. Fuck these bad managers and slipshod stewards.
Re:GIGO (Score: 5, Interesting)
by eneville ( 745111 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @04:43PM (#66210892)
This kind of thing has happened previously too, but it was via "outsourcing" in another contract that didn't work out, so they need the employees back, sometimes as consultants.
What's old is new again.
Re:GIGO (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Provos ( 20410 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @05:28PM (#66210966)
One of the most aggravating things right now is "AI" in the hiring process - companies use it to screen applicants but then all use a common tool like Workday, which is facing a lawsuit in California that seems to be automatically rejecting applicants at all employers once it rejects the candidate at a single employer. Applicants have no idea they've been blindly rejected and the hiring managers, some of whom are absolutely desperate to hire, are never even seeing the applicants' resumes.
(Hapless, because they took the offer to come back instead of finding an employer that properly valued their expertise and experience.)
Keep floundering in a job market that over-rejects people or take a job that gets them income and possibly time to pad their resume with AI related keywords that are legit? Should you really be blaming them for taking the offer?
...Doofus execs given bonuses (Score: 5, Insightful)
by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:12PM (#66210344)
Sure hope those engineers held out for a nice salary bump that should come out of the executive compensation pool, but won't.
Re:...Doofus execs given bonuses (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:56PM (#66210432)
Well, if corporate fires you and then tries to hire you back, you have got to demand a serious raise. Do not take it personal. This? It is called doing business.
Re:...Doofus execs given bonuses (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Inglix the Mad ( 576601 ) on Friday June 26, 2026 @09:48AM (#66211794)
This happened at Kimberly-Clark regarding outsourcing.
A small group of people was offered advanced training on a software package that was hot. They were offered company their standard pay plus weekly paid flights, lodging, meals, and a small guaranteed bump in salary, the whole ten yards, for months to go on-site and get the skills. All they had to do was sign a contract stating they would hang around for a couple years, with the caveat that if they quit they would have to pay that substantial amount of money back.
Fast forward a short period of time, in contract terms, and new executives come in and look at "costs" to cut. Why, look at those expensive people! They can outsource that for less so they fire the people they spent a ridiculous amount to train. This was bad for the workers, but as they didn't quit the company ate the training costs. All of them ended up working elsewhere because those skills were in demand.
Fast forward again and the overseas offshoring company is causing more problems than osolutions. So KC goes looking to rehire these people. Well most of them were employed, for a LOT more money than KC had been paying. They did manage to get a couple people back... but at SIGNIFICANTLY higher costs and three of them flat out refused to come back as regular employees and were hired as consultants for a bit more than FOUR times their previous salaries.
Ford, if I may make a suggestion (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gtall ( 79522 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:14PM (#66210348)
Take every idiot manager that had a hand firing those engineers and put a shadow AI right along side them. Let them compete against the AI for why they should continue to work at Ford rather than having a bot take their place.
Re:Ford, if I may make a suggestion (Score: 5, Interesting)
by AcidFnTonic ( 791034 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @02:07PM (#66210464)
When I worked there in IT for a few years it was amazing how skilled engineers were essentially not at all part of the design process or planning but instead just "handed" some crappy off the shelf product and told to go "implement" it. This to them was software development. Even things like the supposed Sync, are actually just third party development companies using a crappy product called "SmartDeviceLink".
I recall spending months fighting something called an Infrastructure Control Review (ICR) which to this day I share the experience with my employees as a learning exercise in failure. Every filename had to be known, every click in some gui had to be listed, it was just asinine and none of it was ever followed 5 minutes past the approval stamp that took months and months of circle jerking. Never seen so many six figure salary engineers doing absolutely *nothing* in these meetings spanning months.
Ford pretends to want outside expertise and knowledge but the *instant* they arrive the company culture tells them that questioning anything at all will get you enemies fast. Toe that company line and internally the phrase "Ra Ra Go Ford" was used as a mock of this fake stupid energy that dominated the place.
I doubt that will change anytime soon, especially with Farley trying to "secretly" bribe Trump for a law banning the repair of cars without dealership involvement. But the auto journalists want to check out their stupid small EV truck coming out so no one will run the news. Go google it, Ford and GM just had a private meeting with Trump where they asked for this in secret but Trump was too stupid to keep it secret and mentioned it in news interview.
So Fuck Ford for that initiative. Repairing our own cars is part of respecting the customer which they pretend to do.
Truth behind doublespeak (Score: 5, Insightful)
by SouthSeb ( 8814349 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:18PM (#66210356)
I understand Ford is trying to gloss over this story, like they're some sort of humble and benevolent company, but the reality is transparent:
"We fired senior, experienced engineers, tried to substitute them with AI and it didn't work. Now we're rehired some of them to train AI more, so we can fire them again in the near future."
Same Ford asking for bills to outlaw repair (Score: 5, Informative)
by AcidFnTonic ( 791034 ) on Thursday June 25, 2026 @01:52PM (#66210418)
Same Ford asking for bills to outlaw repair. Don't forget they really could care less about your ability to repair your own vehicle.