Ford has spent the past three years rehiring around 350 veteran engineers after admitting its artificial intelligence systems failed to deliver the expected standard in vehicle quality control.
Ford's Vice President of Vehicle Hardware Engineering, Charles Poon, said the company underestimated the value of experienced engineers whose knowledge had not been fully transferred into its AI systems.
The returning specialists now help improve AI driven quality checks, troubleshoot production issues and mentor younger employees.
"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.
"Over prior years, we didn't pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers that have been with us through many product cycles," he said.
The US automaker is among many to have seized on the buzz around AI, particularly amid Wall Street fervour about the tech's potential to increase margins.
Poon told reporters on Wednesday the firm's AI-driven checks had failed to live up to expectations.
"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product," he said.
Poon reportedly pointed to automated tools lacking the training and expertise of veteran technicians - many of whom he said had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve its tech.
He said these human workers had since been reintroduced to train up its systems, as well as mentor younger workers.
"We recognised that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals," he said
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