Amid endless stories centered on the emerging dominance of Artificial Intelligence and the decreasing importance of the human equation, the Ford Motor Company has decided to embrace a different paradigm.
Revealing that “intractable quality woes” have cost the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker billions of dollars, the company has rehired upwards of 350 veteran engineers to do the things that AI can’t.
Beginning around 2023, Ford noticed that multiples of hundreds of AI-powered cameras the company had implemented to review manufacturing and design issues weren’t performing up to snuff.
The problem as subsequently pointed out by Chris Poon, Ford’s vehicle hardware engineering vice president, was that while AI is a remarkable tool, “it’s only as good as the information you used to train it.”
Solution? Bring back the senior engineers, dubbed the “gray beards,” to correct the failure points that AI was missing.
“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,” Poon is quoted as saying in an interview with reporters.
Fortune magazine has quoted a Ford official as having said that the engineers “carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.”
The country’s second-largest automaker now believes that AI “in tandem with deep technical expertise, is what’s needed.”
As a result of the marriage of the “gray beards” with the AI technology, notes a report published by Bloomburg News, Ford now leads both Honda and Toyota in the JD Powell analytics company’s survey measuring the quality of a vehicle during its first three months of ownership.
July 14, 2026
By Garry Boulard
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
