TL; DR
Because AI couldn’t replicate its veteran experience, Ford hired 350 engineers, then became No. 1 in JD Power quality for the first time in 16 years.
Ford admitted it had to rehire experienced engineers because its AI systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of automotive hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could trade in artificial intelligence and still produce a high-quality product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, comes as Ford has won the top spot among major brands in JD Power’s initial quality ranking for the first time in 16 years.
The problem wasn’t that AI was fundamentally disruptive, Poon explained, but that experienced workers left before they could transfer their institutional knowledge to the systems meant to replace them. Without decades of engineering judgment encoded in the training data, Ford’s automated tools reinforced weak inputs instead of catching design flaws. To fill the gap, the company rehired, hired or promoted 350 experienced engineers.
Poon was vague about why those employees left, but not the bigger picture. Ford has lost about 5,300 salaried positions since employment peak in 2020Part of a broader contraction among Detroit automakers that has cut more than 20,000 white-collar jobs. CEO Jim Farley has publicly stated that AI “It will replace half of all white-collar workers in the United States,” a prediction that complicates his own company’s quality crisis now.
The 350 returning engineers were tasked with mentoring a small staff, rebuilding the data pipelines that powered Ford’s AI training and improving the automated systems they were originally supposed to replace. Ford also created a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 AI-powered automated tests to catch advanced cases and revalidate software changes late in development.
The change was enough to propel Ford to the top of JD Power’s 2026 preliminary quality survey, which measures problems reported by owners in the first 90 days of ownership. Ford racked up 152 problems per 100 vehicles, ahead of Nissan and Buick. The F-150, Mustang and Super Duty each won best in segment for the second year in a row.
A quality victory does not erase a rougher mark. Ford has led U.S. automakers in recalls this year, issuing 51 vehicles so far in 2026, covering more than 11 million vehicles, more than twice the next-closest manufacturer. He too joins a growing list of companies finding that removing human judgment from AI-driven workflows creates problems that technology can’t solve on its own..
The episode comes at a time when AI companies and policymakers are trying to figure out what the transition will mean for workers. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon and Microsoft supported RAISE US this weeka $500 million nonprofit led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to retrain American workers for the AI economy. Ford’s experience shows that the more difficult problem is not retraining, but knowing which workers you can’t afford to lose in the first place.
