New Delhi: Apparently, there are some things AI can’t do after all. Recently, the car manufacturer, Ford, rehired more than 300 veteran human engineers after AI failed to deliver the same level of expertise, according to Polymarket.
“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 Bloomberg.
“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,” Poon added.
According to Kumar Galhotra, Ford’s chief operating officer, the grey-beard engineers were “at the heart” of the company’s efforts to turn around quality problems.
In a press release dated 25 June, the American automobile manufacturer said that these engineers will not act as “internal auditors.”
“Running mandatory weekly design reviews to hunt for and eliminate potential failure points before blueprints ever reach the factory floor,” the statement read.
The latest rehiring is part of the brand’s cultural shift in how it deals with its supplier network. Rather than a “go fix it” approach, Ford teams instead focused on why these problems were occurring in the first place.
“It’s easy to celebrate heroes fixing problems. What we really want is to celebrate zero defects,” said Liz Door, Ford chief supply chain officer. “
This comes after most companies are pushing for AI, using it for both vehicle intelligence and production and design. However, according to a 2025 report by Gartner, only five per cent of car firms are expected to sustain massive, long-term AI investments by 2029, as legacy engineering struggles with software-driven development.