Ford execs say they made a mistake when they replaced human engineers with AI

Ford admits AI couldn't replace experienced engineers, rehiring veterans to improve quality and cut recall costs.

Ford recently announced that over the last three years, it's had to rehire about 350 "gray beard" engineers to mentor younger staff and reprogram diagnostic systems and AI tools that were failing to meet up to quality expectations.

The company's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, Charles Poon said that leaders overlooked the deep experience of veterans who survived many product cycles. Poon admitted that simply replacing them with AI was a huge mistake, and that while AI is "a fantastic tool," it remains "only as good as the information you use to train it."

The rehired engineers now run mandatory meetings to troubleshoot vehicles and reprogram automated engineering software and AI tools to prevent glitches before production. These technical specialists hunt for failure points before parts ever reach the plant floor, helping prevent the massive recalls and defects that previously cost the company billions as it aims to cut one billion dollars in expenses this year.

In last year's JD Power Quality Survey, an annual study that measures the quality of a car during the first three months of ownership, Ford finished 10th among mainstream brands and scored below the industry average. But this year, JD Power ranked the automaker as the top mainstream brand, placing it above the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ford attributed this massive improvement directly to the expertise of these returned engineers.

Ford's realization that AI cannot magically design and test quality vehicles without senior human oversight is just the tip of the iceberg. When Careerminds looked at companies that conducted AI-driven layoffs, researchers found out that 35.6% of those companies had to rehire more than half of the employees they previously fired. Another 32.7% had to rehire between 25% and 50% of them.

In 2024, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, proudly announced that its new chatbot was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. As a result, the fintech company froze hiring and cut hundreds of positions. But by mid 2025, and into 2026, Klarna was scrambling to recruit human agents again because customer satisfaction had plummeted. It turns out, while AI is very good at answering basic questions like how to check an account balance, when faced with complex customer issues that require nuance, the thing usually resorts to the unhelpful, robotic corporate jargon we all know and love.

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Posted Friday 26 June 2026 at 2:27 pm AEST (my time).

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