Ford Rehires 'Gray Beard' Engineers After AI Falls Short
10 94Ford executives said they've hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees — after AI and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality, reports TechCrunch: Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."
Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "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."
The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools.
10 comments
Either this is a dupe... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @01:36AM (#66216358)
Or Ford has no hired 700 senior engineers.
https://slashdot.org/story/26/... [slashdot.org]
Re:Either this is a dupe... (Score: 5, Funny)
by Gideon Fubar ( 833343 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @01:44AM (#66216362)
Sadly it is referencing the same article
Re:Did the manager pushing the AI loose his job? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Creepy ( 93888 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:20AM (#66216374)
My guess is it was 7 different managers in 7 different divisions that all got together one day and decided to lay off people and use 7 different AIs and none did what they wanted. Just going by my experince working with Ford. We literally called them the 7 headed monster because they couldn't get management consensus and pulled us like 5 directions at once, and also bought in on every new technology before it was vetted.
Re:Did the manager pushing the AI loose his job? (Score: 5, Interesting)
by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @04:54AM (#66216444)
The AI was an excuse for layoffs. They fired thousands of workers [cnbc.com].
This is signaling to the current employees that the layoffs are done, to prevent them from quitting and finding other jobs.
This indirect messaging is annoying until you compare it to the Zuck/Meta direct way of saying, "We laid off low performers" immediately hurting the job search of any former Facebook employee.
Gray beard? (Score: 5, Funny)
by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:32AM (#66216382)
Dude I am so back. Finally a job I qualify for. Do I have to remove the crumbs and soup bits or no?
Quitters (Score: 5, Funny)
by bleedingobvious ( 6265230 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @02:38AM (#66216386)
They just didn't AI hard enough!
The real value happens when you're 7 LLMs deep with agentic whatnots! So Simple. Just needed more AI!
Re:Not holding it right. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @09:18AM (#66216644)
The disconnect is the "promise" is that LLM brings expertise down to the masses. If AI is "too hard for Ford to get right", that dramatically undermines the messaging that drives the current expectations and levels of investment.
This is very much evidence that companies can't be as bullish as they might inclined to be, because whatever you may think of Ford, the typical company is probably worse.
Adam Becker's book (Score: 5, Insightful)
by gtall ( 79522 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @03:45AM (#66216400)
Apparently the nimnods at Ford bought into the crap the Sil-Val-Bros have been selling about how AI will make everything better. If you want to know what those assholes have in store for us proles, read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.
And it does not stop with Sil-Val, apparently more money than brains makes one stupid (i.e., Besos, Elmo, etc.). You might dismiss their fevered dreams (creating an AI of themselves so they can live forever, going to Mars, planting data center warts across America to suck up power and resources, etc.), but they have a lot of money and are intent on doing a lot of "restructuring" with it. Hint, us proles do not count.
Re: Smart People (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @09:00AM (#66216616)
Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.
History rhymes once again (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @08:35AM (#66216580)
Years ago, when I worked for Generous Electric, some brilliant CFO decided the way to cut costs was to offer early retirement with a generous package to get rid of expensive engineers. All the senior engineers I worked with spent their days justifying why they should get a package, and ultimately they did. Six month Slater tehy were rehired when GE discovered they were the only ones that really understood how to fix the systems when they broke, since they had years of experience doing just that. The upshot was they kept all their retirement package benefits plus got those of a full time employee.