Ford Thought They Could Replace Quality Inspectors With AI. Here’s Why They Immediately Regretted It

You can’t spell ‘ca(i)r’ without ‘ai’

FoMoCo, AKA Ford, has just made an embarrassing U-turn when it realised that the AI it employed to perform quality checks on its cars was actually incompetent. Ford then immediately rehired some 300 quality inspectors in hopes to course correct.

The new/old inspectors are reportedly hard at work removing the extra fingers from the AI-approved vehicles.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” explained vehicle hardware engineering VP, Charles Poon (that can’t be a real name, maybe he’s AI).

“Over prior years,” he continued, “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.”

Let me translate that from corporate speak into plain English: ‘we screwed up’.

Back in October, COO Kumar Galhotra excitedly announced that they were rolling out 900 AI cameras “to detect quality issues at the source and help us mitigate supply disruptions.” And now I guess they’re all being rolled back.

It’s just one of many recent stories of corporations jumping on the supposed abilities of AI a bit too fast without thinking through the implications.

Humans to rebrand themselves as ‘AI but cheaper’ to retain jobs

According to Poon, crucially, Ford fired the veteran QA workers before those workers could train the AI.

Wait, is Ford just going to fire those 300 people the moment the AI’s trained properly? 

Also, ironically, this news only came to light because Ford released a press release explaining that they’ve reached the top spot of the US JD Power Initial Quality Study (an industry measure of vehicle quality) for the first time since 2010.

So are your cars high quality or not? WHICH IS IT, FORD??!!

Well, whichever it is, now the AI is out and the veterans “who carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design” are in. If only they had realised that months ago.

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Ima Short• June 30, 2026D

Ford Thought They Could Replace Quality Inspectors With AI. Here’s Why They Immediately Regretted It

FoMoCo, AKA Ford, has just made an embarrassing U-turn when it realised that the AI it emp...
Tech
Ima Short• D

Ford Thought They Could Replace Quality Inspectors With AI. Here’s Why They Immediately Regretted It

FoMoCo, AKA Ford, has just made an embarrassing U-turn when it realised that the AI it emp...
Tech