Auto giant Ford has rehired more than 300 veteran quality inspectors and engineers after its artificial intelligence-driven vehicle quality checks failed to deliver the expected results, with company executives acknowledging that the technology could not replace the experience and expertise of seasoned workers.
In a bid to reap the benefits of AI, which developers claimed can cut costs and boost productivity, the US automaker had adopted the technology across parts of its operations, including vehicle quality inspections.
According to Bloomberg, the company has rehired more than 300 veteran quality inspectors and engineers in recent years to address the shortcomings of its automated systems.
“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering, told reporters.
“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,” he said.
Ford is among many companies that have embraced AI amid growing optimism on Wall Street about the technology’s potential to improve efficiency and increase profit margins.
“AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind,” Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley said during an interview with author Walter Isaacson last June.
During the company’s October earnings call, Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said Ford was “deploying AI across the entire industrial system.”
He said this included rolling out 900 AI-powered cameras across its plants “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions.”
However, Poon told reporters on Wednesday that the company’s AI-driven quality checks had failed to meet expectations.
“Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product,” he said.
According to Bloomberg, Poon explained that the automated tools lacked the training and expertise possessed by veteran technicians, many of whom had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve its AI systems.
He said the experienced workers had since been brought back to help train the company’s automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, as well as mentor younger employees.
“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,” he said, according to Bloomberg.
Ford’s admission of shortcomings in its AI systems came as the company celebrated its return to the top of the JD Power Initial Quality Study, an industry benchmark for measuring vehicle quality.
The company said it ranked as the number one mainstream automaker in the United States, a position it had not held since 2010.
In a press release announcing the achievement, Ford said: “Reaching best-in-class quality required a significant talent refresh.”
The company said the effort involved replacing senior leaders across engineering, supply chain and manufacturing, as well as hiring about 300 veteran engineers “who carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.”
