Ford has hired over 300 veteran engineers—many of them former employees—to address lapses in automated quality systems. Over the past three years, these seasoned quality inspectors were brought back in to help train newer staff to reconfigure the brand’s artificial intelligence tools and fix overall quality issues that the brand has been facing.
According to Ford vice president of vehicle hardware engineering Charles Poon, in a report by Bloomberg, “artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it. Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through many product cycles.”
The engineers were reportedly a mainstay in the American carmaker’s efforts to reduce quality-related problems before AI tools took over. Currently, they command meetings that rigorously address modern quality issues and help reprogram AI tools that haven’t been achieving the manufacturer’s desired results.
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And so far, it looks like it’s working for Ford, with coverage and recall costs said to be coming down, contributing to hundreds of millions of dollars saved in costs. The company acknowledged its faults and admitted that experienced workers remain essential even as AI tools continue to advance.
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” said Poon. “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.”
