The TL;DR
Ford rehired 350 engineers after AI failed to replicate veteran expertise, then hit JD Power’s No 1 quality for the first time in 16 years.
Ford has admitted it had to rehire experienced engineers after its AI systems failed to deliver the quality the company expected. Charles Poon, Ford’s Vice President of Automotive Engineering, told reporters that the automaker mistakenly believed it could replace AI and produce a superior product. The admission, first reported by The Verge, comes as Ford earned the top spot among top brands in JD Power’s first quality ranking for the first time in 16 years.
The problem wasn’t that the AI was broken, Poon explained, but that experienced workers left before they could transfer their institutional knowledge to the programs meant to replace them. Without decades of engineering judgment embedded in training data, Ford’s automated tools amplify weak inputs rather than catch design flaws. The company has rehired, newly hired, or promoted 350 experienced engineers to fill the gap.
Poon wasn’t clear on why those workers are leaving, but the bigger picture is not. Ford has eliminated about 5,300 senior positions since hiring in 2020, part of broader cuts at the Detroit automaker that have eliminated more than 20,000 white-collar jobs. CEO Jim Farley has publicly stated that AI “will replace half of all US workers,” the prediction of his company’s quality problem is now becoming more complex.
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The 350 returning engineers are tasked with training a small workforce, rebuilding the data pipelines that feed Ford’s AI training, and refining the automation systems that were originally supposed to be replaced. Ford also created a dedicated 40-person software quality assurance team and added more than 100,000 automated AI tests to catch advanced cases and validate software changes late in development.
The changes were enough to push Ford to the top of JD Power’s first quality survey for 2026, which measures problems reported by owners in the first 90 days of ownership. Ford found 152 problems out of 100 vehicles, ahead of Nissan and Buick. The F-150, Mustang, and Super Duty each won best in class for the second year in a row.
A quality win doesn’t erase a bad record. Ford led American automakers this year, releasing 51 so far in 2026 totaling more than 11 million vehicles, more than double the next-door manufacturer. It also joins a growing list of companies that are finding that removing human judgment from AI-driven workflows creates problems that technology can’t fix on its own.
The episode comes at a time when AI companies and policymakers are scrambling to figure out what this change means for workers. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft this week supported RAISE US, a $500 million nonprofit led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to retrain America’s workforce for the AI economy. What happened at Ford shows that the most difficult problem is not retraining but knowing which workers you can’t afford to lose in the first place.
