Ford thought AI could replace this job. Now it’s bringing experienced workers back.

Ford says that it rehired hundreds of auto industry veterans after realizing that an overreliance on AI caused some expensive headaches at the company. The carmaker folded 350 “gray beard” engineers into its workforce over the last three years, including many former Ford workers who were hired to troubleshoot the company’s infamous reliability woes, Bloomberg reports. Ford COO Kumar Galhotra said that the carmaker “had been relying more and more on automated quality systems,” but AI wasn’t meeting the company’s standards for reliability. With computers not cutting it, Ford “brought back technical specialists [who can] hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor,” Galhotra said. The human workers and their combined years of experience became the centerpiece of Ford’s crusade to make its cars more reliable. “We’re seeing our warranty coverages come down. We’re seeing our recall costs come down,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg, creating a “tailwind” of hundreds of millions of dollars in saved costs. “Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Ford Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering Charles Poon said. “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.” Ford’s reliability reversal Investing in its human workforce is already paying off. In the new 2026 JD Power Initial Quality Study, which measures a car’s reliability in its first three months, Ford won the top spot for a mainstream brand. It’s a huge reversal from the American automaker’s 10th place spot last year, and Ford even beat out Toyota and Honda – two auto brands synonymous with reliability. Ford set new records for the most safety recalls in a calendar year in 2025, as problem after problem emerged in its lineup of cars and trucks. From worries about cracked fuel injectors to the threat of its vehicles stalling out on the road, warranty repairs have cost Ford billions in recent years. In 2023 alone, Ford paid 4.8 billion to fix problems with customers’ vehicles, triple the industry average. Even with recalls on the rise broadly, Ford led the pack as the most-recalled carmaker in the U.S. The recall issues were so bad that the carmaker began holding back redesigned models for up to six weeks before release to make time for additional quality checks – a process led by its human workforce. “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 said. Ford eventually realized that its automated systems and AI tools couldn’t operate without old-fashioned human expertise. Between hiring back veteran engineers and adding layers of quality control, Ford expects its recall costs to plummet in the coming years, though the improvements are expected to lag some behind recent changes,