Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley said that AI would eliminate half of white-collar jobs. This year, Ford brought back 350 veteran techs after an AI-powered system failed to deliver the results executives expected. Internally they are called "graybeard" engineers, persumably in honor of the ancient wisdom and grizzled experience that no software can yet replace.
"Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters this week. The bet did not pay off.
Poon noted that some of Ford's most experienced workers left before their knowledge was "captured" in its systems, which left the AI tools trained on incomplete information.
Also back on the menu in Michigan: mandatory design reviews, mentoring younger staff, and careful oversight of how AI tools are trained. Ford still plans to cut roughly $1 billion in costs this year and celebrated its first-place finish among mainstream brands in this week's J.D. Power Initial Quality Study, its first such ranking in 16 years.
But Ford issued 152 recalls in 2025, a single-year record, and has logged dozens so far in 2026, more than any other automaker.
The trough of disillusionment beckons. An MIT study recently found that about 95% of corporate generative-AI pilots produced no measurable profit. S&P Global Market Intelligence found that the share of companies scrapping most of their AI initiatives rose to 42% in 2025 from 17% a year earlier.
Klarna offered a particularly delicious example of corporate AI hype and failure. The Swedish payments company said in 2024 that its chatbot did the work of 700 agents, and its chief executive claimed AI could already do every human job. By early 2026 he had eaten that sandwich and reversed the hiring freeze, telling Bloomberg that customers needed humans.
Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short [bloomberg.com]
