Ford is taking a rare step for a major manufacturer by dialing back its reliance on AI and bringing people back into the process. The shift comes after automation failed to deliver the quality results the company expected.
The automaker has rehired 350 engineers, including former Ford employees and ex-workers from suppliers. They are being brought in to identify quality problems before parts reach the factory floor.
Why Ford is leaning back on human expertise
Charles Poon, Ford’s Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering, said the company misjudged what AI could do on its own. Ford had assumed that combining AI with its existing design requirements would naturally produce high-quality products.
“We were wrong. We thought that just by introducing AI and putting in the design requirements we had, it would produce high-quality products. But we were wrong,” Poon said.
COO Kumar Galhotra also said Ford’s automated quality systems did not produce satisfactory results. Because of that, the company is once again relying on technical experts and specialists to find failure points earlier in the production chain.
| Ford Move | Purpose | Reported Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Rehiring 350 engineers | Find failure points before parts enter the plant | Lower warranty costs and fewer recalls |
| Reusing technical experts | Train younger workers and reprogram AI tools | Potential savings of hundreds of millions of dollars |
This does not mean Ford is abandoning AI entirely. Instead, the company is using the rehired employees to train younger staff and make the AI tools more useful in production.
CEO Jim Farley said bringing back former workers has helped reduce warranty costs and product recall rates. He added that reusing human expertise has contributed to savings of hundreds of millions of dollars.
The results are also reflected in Ford’s position in the Initial Quality Survey from JD Power released last week. Ford was said to rank at the top among well-known car brands, according to KompasTekno’s report from TechCrunch.
Other companies are rethinking their AI bets too
Ford is not the only company reassessing its AI strategy. Klarna, the Swedish financial technology company, also admitted it had gone too far in relying on AI after cutting around 1,200 employees in 2024.
By 2025, Klarna began opening jobs again after deciding that AI had not delivered the results it hoped for. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company had used AI aggressively to cut costs, improve efficiency, and speed up decision-making.
That strategy reduced headcount from around 5,000 to 3,800, along with ending work with several vendors and using AI chatbots that replaced about 700 customer service agents.
Although the chatbots cut customer service resolution time from an average of 11 minutes to two minutes and saved about US$2 million, Siemiatkowski said the gains were still not enough to lift productivity or service quality.
“We may have gone a bit too far with AI, so over the last six months we have been trying to fix it,” he said.
Siemiatkowski also stressed that investors want not only lower costs, but also business growth and better product quality. For that reason, Klarna is now opening more than two dozen new positions while still treating AI as support rather than a full replacement for human workers.