Fears over losing jobs to artificial intelligence bots have abounded in the last couple years during the AI boom — and in some cases have even been realized.
However, one top automaker has decided to try something new in the age of AI: reversing course and rehiring the “gray beards” who were originally let go.
‘Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers.’
And this novel experiment of bringing back experienced engineers might pay off.
Ford Motor Co. has decided to change course away from replacing senior engineers with artificial intelligence after an apparent realization that experience is nearly impossible to replace.
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Bloomberg reported this week that Ford has hired 350 veteran engineers over the last three years after the company’s push toward AI drove costs and, it seems, tanked the quality of the products.
Much of the incurred cost for the company related to repairs and warranty coverages, Ford’s CEO suggested to Bloomberg.
“We’re seeing our warranty coverages come down. We’re seeing our recall costs come down,” chief executive officer Jim Farley said after the engineers were rehired. “These are all contributing to literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of a tailwind for Ford on cost.”
The switch, Bloomberg noted, has already yielded some positive results, with Ford ranking first in mass-market brands in the new JD Power Initial Quality Survey.
The experienced engineers were hired to train younger staff and reprogram the artificial intelligence agents, officials indicated.
“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 Bloomberg. “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.”
“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,” Poon continued. But “we recognized 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.”
All told, the company hopes to cut $1 billion in costs this year.
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Artificial intelligence, Ford motor company, Engineers, Politics
