ALBAWABA - Ford, trying to cut costs as companies do, has bought into the AI buzz and subsequently decided to fire their top safety and quality engineers after deciding that AI can do their job. Turns out, it can’t.
Ford, whose boss Jim Farley said: “AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind,” has now rehired those white collar people after AI wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
"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," Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters.
"Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it's only as good as the information you use to train it," he added.
Ford has rehired over 300 veterans in quality and safety assurance, according to Bloomberg. As the AI-implemented automated system had many pitfalls which compromised the safety and quality of Ford products.
The system which Ford wanted to replace humans with is made up of 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants "to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions", a Ford operating officer told investors.
However, the system didn’t match up to human talent; "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product," Charles Poon said.
The decision comes as a rare win for real intelligence versus artificial intelligence in the job and manufacturing market.
