Ford’s experience is echoed by Commonwealth Bank of Australia and IBM, which have also leaned back toward human oversight after AI-led cuts or automation fell short in some functions.
Ford Motor Company says hiring 350 veteran engineers over the past three years has helped improve vehicle quality after the automaker concluded that artificial intelligence works best when guided by experienced staff. Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, said AI is a useful tool only when trained on strong information, while the company acknowledged it had previously underused engineers with knowledge built across multiple product cycles. The shift followed a costly stretch in which recalls were running at $4.8 billion annually by mid-2024, and Ford logged 90 recalls last year, the most ever issued by an automaker in a single year, including an estimated $570 million charge tied to nearly 700,000 crossover vehicles. Ford now says its quality effort, which it describes as a culture change centered on human expertise, helped it rank No. 1 among mainstream brands in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey after placing 10th a year earlier. Similar reassessments have surfaced elsewhere: Commonwealth Bank of Australia reversed customer service job cuts after an AI voice bot struggled to handle call volumes, while IBM said AI could manage about 94% of routine HR requests but not the remainder, including ethical issues, and later said it would triple U.S. entry-level hiring across business units in 2026. Analysts and workplace researchers say the pattern highlights the limits of using AI primarily to replace staff, with some companies later rehiring workers to restore oversight, decision-making and operational resilience.