Ford Rehires 'Gray Beard' Engineers After AI Falls Short (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0184173286
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/06/29/0321238/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/
> [2]Bloomberg reports the company's chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra told journalists that Ford had been "relying more and more on automated quality systems" with disappointing results. So the company "brought back technical specialists," and those specialists "hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor."
>
> Charles Poon, Ford's vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, added, "Mistakenly we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product."
The article points out that Ford is using the rehired gray beard engineers to train younger staff — and, to reprogram its AI tools.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/28/ford-rehires-gray-beard-engineers-after-ai-falls-short/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/ford-has-been-rehiring-quality-inspectors-after-ai-fell-short
Did the manager pushing the AI loose his job? (Score:2)
I'll bet he came up with yet another ploy to get his next bonus after throwing out these people on the street.
Re: (Score:3)
My guess is it was 7 different managers in 7 different divisions that all got together one day and decided to lay off people and use 7 different AIs and none did what they wanted. Just going by my experince working with Ford. We literally called them the 7 headed monster because they couldn't get management consensus and pulled us like 5 directions at once, and also bought in on every new technology before it was vetted.
Re: (Score:2)
The AI was an excuse for layoffs. They fired [1]thousands of workers [cnbc.com].
This is signaling to the current employees that the layoffs are done, to prevent them from quitting and finding other jobs.
This indirect messaging is annoying until you compare it to the Zuck/Meta direct way of saying, "We laid off low performers" immediately hurting the job search of any former Facebook employee.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/15/general-motors-ford-stellantis-job-cuts-ai.html
Gray beard? (Score:4, Funny)
Dude I am so back. Finally a job I qualify for. Do I have to remove the crumbs and soup bits or no?
Re: Gray beard? (Score:2)
I believe it was graybeards AND silverbacks and I honestly don't know who came up with that memo. But it also mentioned getting some broads back in the office
Quitters (Score:3)
They just didn't AI hard enough!
The real value happens when you're 7 LLMs deep with agentic whatnots! So Simple. Just needed more AI!
Re: (Score:2)
keep the garlic, keeps the managers at bay
Not holding it right. (Score:1)
AI is very malluable. There are a lot of different ways to use it. Some ways work well, some don't, some haven't been thought of or tried yet. These sets are also changing with each new frontier advance. This is only the beginning.
The fact that a antiquated old company like Ford couldn't figure out how to use it properly yet is evidence of nothing.
Whats company age got to do with it? (Score:2)
You think smart engineers and programmers only work at week old start-ups full of pink hairs and ping pong tables? Think again mate. IBM is almost as old as Ford and is at the cutting edge in a number of spheres of research.
Adam Becker's book (Score:3)
Apparently the nimnods at Ford bought into the crap the Sil-Val-Bros have been selling about how AI will make everything better. If you want to know what those assholes have in store for us proles, read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.
And it does not stop with Sil-Val, apparently more money than brains makes one stupid (i.e., Besos, Elmo, etc.). You might dismiss their fevered dreams (creating an AI of themselves so they can live forever, going to Mars, planting data center warts across America to suck up power and resources, etc.), but they have a lot of money and are intent on doing a lot of "restructuring" with it. Hint, us proles do not count.
Re: (Score:2)
AI was just an excuse for having layoffs that they wanted anyway.
Charles Poon, please resign! (Score:2)
Mr. Charles Poon, if you have perhaps 1 micro g of dignity, you should publicly apologize, resign and perhaps beg for some money in the streets.
You clearly demonstrated your inability to think.
wow (Score:1)
who'd have thought ? ;-)
Either this is a dupe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Ford has no hired 700 senior engineers.
[1]https://slashdot.org/story/26/... [slashdot.org]
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/25/1624241/ford-rehires-350-engineers-after-ai-fails-to-preserve-expertise-or-train-juniors
Re:Either this is a dupe... (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly it is referencing the same article