Ford had to hire back former engineers to fix mistakes made by its automated systems

Ford recently achieved the top ranking in initial quality among mainstream automakers for the first time in 16 years, but the company has now revealed that automated systems used in its production and design made significant errors that required correction. To fix these mistakes, Ford had to hire back former engineers and experienced technicians, recognizing that the automated systems lacked the robustness initially expected. Ford's leadership acknowledged that they underestimated how much the institutional knowledge of veteran engineers mattered, and that the quality of AI depends entirely on the data used to train the models. Some experienced personnel had left before their accumulated knowledge could be fully transferred into the automated systems, necessitating their return to retrain those systems or mentor younger engineers.