Ford on why it hired 350 ‘gray beard’ engineers: you need their mentorship for younger workers — and to drive huge AI productivity gains

WIth all the discussion about the AI bubble, AI hype, and mass automation displacement, Ford Motor Company has a message for the U.S. economy: Human experience matters. 

Over the last three years, the company has hired 350 veteran engineers—dubbed “gray beards” internally and made up of both former Ford employees and workers from suppliers—to help train junior staff and reprogram ineffective artificial intelligence tools. It’s because the company realized what AI is and isn’t good for.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters last week. “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.”

“These engineers carry the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design,” a Ford representative told Fortune, adding that they serve as “internal auditors,” running mandatory weekly peer design reviews to hunt for and eliminate potential failure points before blueprints ever reach the factory floor. At the same time, the company said AI is very important to quality gains, “and that, in tandem with deep technical expertise, is what’s needed.”

The combination is “powerful,” Ford said, noting the example of one of its AI vision systems, which uses off-the-shelf smartphones to look at things like hose connections and electrical connections on the assembly line. “The system acts like an extra set of highly precise eyes to perform quality checks with a high level of consistency. When it finds an issue, it alerts the operator so they can make a correction before the component moves down the assembly line.” Ford is using this vision system across 33 plants around the world, the company added, with more than 1,000 cameras performing millions of inspections.

By mid-2024, recalls were costing Ford $4.8 billion per year. Last July, the........

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