{"slug": "ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short", "title": "Ford rehires ‘gray beard’ engineers after AI falls short", "summary": "Ford has rehired 350 veteran engineers, including former employees and supplier veterans, after AI and automated quality systems failed to meet expectations. The company's COO Kumar Galhotra said the move aims to improve quality by having these specialists identify failure points before parts reach the factory floor. Ford expects the rehiring to save $1 billion this year and has already topped the JD Power Initial Quality Survey among mainstream brands.", "body_md": "Ford executives said they have hired 350 veteran engineers — some of them were former employees, while others had been working at suppliers — after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level.\n\n[Bloomberg reports](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-been-rehiring-quality-inspectors-after-ai-fell-short) the company’s chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been “relying more and more on automated quality systems” with disappointing results. So the company “brought back technical specialists,” and those specialists “hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”\n\nCharles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, “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.”\n\nTo be clear, this doesn’t mean Ford is abandoning its AI plans entirely. Instead, it’s using the rehired employees — referred to as “gray beard” engineers — to train younger staff and reprogram AI tools.\n\nThis rehiring seems to be paying off, with Ford anticipating that it will lead to $1 billion in reduced costs this year. The automaker also claimed the top spot among mainstream brands in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey released this week.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/", "published_at": "2026-06-28 19:05:39+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-28 23:04:49.944228+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-ethics", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Ford", "Kumar Galhotra", "Charles Poon", "Bloomberg", "JD Power"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short.jsonld"}}