WHY IT MATTERS: Good news for those worried about losing their jobs to AI. More evidence is emerging that companies are losing faith in the technology's ability to replace humans, with an increasing number of firms rehiring people who were let go because of AI automation.
It was reported last week that Ford was re-employing and promoting more than 350 veteran engineers. Because their often-undocumented experience was not captured in the datasets used to train the AI systems, Ford was running into knowledge gaps when it came to identifying and preventing issues.
It's not just Ford, either. CNBC reports that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia laid off more than 40 customer service staff last year and replaced them with an AI voice bot. Unsurprisingly, it couldn't perform its job as well as a human, leading to an increase in the number of calls and CBA reversing its job cuts.
CBA later admitted that it "did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations" when announcing the redundancies.
Elsewhere, IBM, a company that cut thousands of jobs last year as it pushed deeper into AI and automation, said in February that it would triple entry-level hiring for roles covering "all these jobs we're being told AI can do."
