Ford brings 'veteran' engineers out of retirement to show AI how it's done

Ford has been forced to bring more than 300 ex-engineers out of retirement after AI systems failed to live up to expectations in quality control.

The American car giant had grown increasingly dependent on AI for its engineering and manufacturing processes.

The rehired specialists, known internally as "greybeards," have been hauled back to work to help boost vehicle reliability, Bloomberg reported.

Ford admitted its automated quality checks had not delivered the results it wanted.

"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.

Mr Poon also confessed Ford had failed to properly consider the skills and experience of its most seasoned staff.

"Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles," he said.

"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product."

Chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra had previously said the firm was "deploying AI across the entire industrial system."

The experienced engineers now provide training for Ford's AI systems - as well as their younger colleagues.

They lead rigorous meetings focused on identifying quality issues and have adjusted AI tools to catch problems before parts reach the factory floor.

"We recognised 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," Mr Poon said.

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Mr Galhotra was also forced to fess up to why the "greybeards" had been marched back.

"We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results," he said.

"We brought back technical specialists - they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."

Ford's admission that AI had fallen short came just as it marked a significant achievement in industry rankings.

The manufacturer claimed the top spot among mainstream carmakers in the latest US JD Power Initial Quality Study.

It was a position Ford had not occupied for 15 long years.

The company attributed its success to a "significant talent refresh" - including the return of its veteran engineers.

Despite the U-turn, Ford maintains AI performs best when combined with decades of human expertise.

But it looks that seasoned specialists remain indispensable, at least for now.

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