TL;DRFord rehired 350 engineers after AI failed to replicate veteran expertise, then hit No 1 in JD Power quality for the first time in 16 years.
Ford has admitted that it had to rehire experienced engineers after its AI systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s VP of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could swap in AI and still produce a high-quality product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, comes as Ford earned the top spot among mainstream brands in JD Power’s initial quality ranking for the first time in 16 years.
The problem was not that the AI was fundamentally broken, Poon explained, but that experienced workers left before they could transfer their institutional knowledge into the systems meant to replace them. Without decades of engineering judgment encoded in the training data, Ford’s automated tools amplified weak inputs rather than catching design flaws. The company rehired, newly hired, or promoted 350 experienced engineers to fill the gap.
Poon was vague about why those workers left, but the broader picture is not. Ford has shed roughly 5,300 salaried positions since its 2020 employment peak, part of a wider contraction across Detroit’s automakers that has eliminated more than 20,000 white-collar jobs. CEO Jim Farley has said publicly that AI “is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US,” a prediction his own company’s quality crisis now complicates.
