Ford has spent the last year quietly bringing back hundreds of veteran quality engineers because the AI systems meant to replace them kept missing problems the humans used to catch.
Last June at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ford CEO Jim Farley predicted AI was "going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US." About a year later, his own company was doing the opposite. According to Business Insider, Ford rehired around 350 quality engineers after concluding the automated systems on their own weren't good enough.
The admission from COO Kumar Galhotra was unusually direct for a Fortune 50 executive. "We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems and not getting the desired results," he told Transport Topics. The company brought back technical specialists to hunt for failure points before parts ever reached the line.
The miss was expensive. Ford issued 94 recalls in 2025 covering nearly 20 million vehicles, the worst year in its history. The Lincoln Aviator alone was on track for a projected 92 recalls over its lifetime, against an industry median of 3.9.
Charles Poon, Ford's VP of vehicle hardware engineering, has been the one explaining what actually went wrong. The company assumed AI plus tighter design rules would produce a quality car. It didn't. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," Poon said.
What the AI couldn't see, according to Poon, were the cracks between teams. Quality problems tend to show up at the boundaries where design, manufacturing, software, and hardware collide, and that's the kind of thing you only catch if you've shipped a dozen product cycles and know what a given supplier always screws up in week three. Ford had been feeding its systems specs and rules without the institutional memory sitting inside its most experienced people, who happen to be the same people the wider industry has been racing to automate away.
The rehires worked. Ford topped the 2026 J.D. Power Initial Quality Study among mass-market brands, a 41-point improvement year over year and the largest jump of any mainstream automaker. Seven of its ten surveyed models landed in the top three of their segments, with the F-150, Mustang, and Super Duty taking the top spot in their respective categories.
Most executives making AI-replaces-humans predictions right now are making them about jobs they have never personally done. Farley has never been a quality engineer, and he couldn't tell you what those people actually catch, because the whole point of catching it is that the rest of the company never sees the problem. Ford had to spend close to $2 billion in recall costs and torch its quality reputation to find out what its veterans were worth. The next CEO running this experiment will probably pay similar tuition. The bill will just land in a different department.
