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Ford Sacked Its Best Engineers For AI. Then Had To Beg Them Back.

Joe Sack  |  July 2026  |  Blog

Ford is a company that has been building cars for 122 years. It has more engineers, more money, and more data than almost any business you will ever work with. It spent three years finding out that AI could not do a job its own experienced staff could. So it hired them back.

If a company that size can get this wrong at this scale, it is worth asking what it actually got wrong, and whether the same mistake is sitting somewhere in your business right now, just smaller and quieter.

What Actually Happened At Ford

Ford leaned on AI and automated tools to run vehicle quality control, then discovered the AI could not catch problems its experienced engineers used to catch. Over the past three years it has rehired, newly hired, or promoted 350 veteran engineers to fix the gap and retrain the systems properly.

Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly to reporters this week. “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.

The problem was not that the AI was broken. It was that Ford’s most experienced people, the ones who could spot a flaw by instinct after decades on the job, had already left before anyone thought to capture what they knew. The AI was trained on what was left. Without that judgement built in, it missed things a human would have caught instantly.

Those 350 engineers are now mentoring younger staff and rebuilding the data that feeds Ford’s automated systems. Ford’s COO Kumar Galhotra confirmed the automated quality checks simply were not delivering. The company has also added a 40 person software quality team and more than 100,000 automated tests on top of the original AI tools, because the fix was not “less AI”, it was “AI with the right people steering it”.

There is a genuinely positive ending here. Ford’s quality overhaul helped it take first place among mainstream automakers in this year’s JD Power Initial Quality Study, its best result since 2010. CEO Jim Farley says falling warranty and recall costs are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But it took three years and a very public U-turn to get there, and Ford has still led every US automaker in recalls this year, with 51 recalls covering more than 11 million vehicles.

Why A Car Company’s Mistake Matters To A Muswell Hill Shop Owner

Ford’s mistake was removing experienced judgement before AI had anything to replace it with. The same mistake happens on a smaller scale in local businesses, when a shop owner asks a chatbot to write their marketing or handle a customer query without knowing enough about their own business to check the output. The tool needs a person feeding it real expertise, not the other way round.

You are not going to fire your longest serving member of staff and replace them with ChatGPT. But the same underlying error shows up in smaller forms all the time. A therapist using an AI note taking tool without checking it has captured the session correctly. A tradesperson letting a chatbot draft a quote without knowing which materials actually cost what this month. A retailer taking an AI generated stock forecast at face value because it came with a confident looking graph.

AI is only as good as the judgement that goes into using it. Ford had the money to throw 350 salaries at fixing that. Most businesses on the high street get one shot at getting it right, because they do not have the budget to hire back what they lost.

The Reddit Reaction Was Blunt, And Mostly Right

Reaction across Reddit to the Ford story was overwhelmingly cynical, with the top comments accusing Ford of cutting experienced staff for short term savings and only reversing course once the cost of getting it wrong became too visible to ignore. A smaller number of commenters pointed out something more useful: that AI genuinely can help, but only in the hands of someone who already knows what good work looks like.

The most upvoted comment on the original r/technology thread, from user ottwebdev, joked that Ford’s message to its former staff was essentially “sorry about that whole firing thing, can you come back to train our AI so we can fire you again.” It captured the mood of the thread: thousands of people assuming this was a cost cutting exercise dressed up as an AI story.

A quieter but sharper thread of comments made a different point. One user, going by TrekkieGod, described being the only person at their own company who understood a piece of critical, undocumented software, and how nobody wanted to invest in fixing that until they resigned and the company had to pay a consulting rate to get them back. Another commenter, NobodysFavorite, summed up a pattern seen across the whole discussion: “Fire the people first. Then tell the remainder they have to innovate to cover the gap or be punished and fired.”

That comment, from Reddit user MongoBongoTown, is worth sitting with. It is the entire Ford story in two sentences, and it applies just as much to a two person business in Hornsey as it does to a car company with 170,000 employees.

What This Actually Teaches A Small Business

The lesson from Ford is not “avoid AI”. Ford is not walking away from AI, it is adding more of it. The lesson is that AI works when it is built on real expertise and checked by someone who understands the business, and it fails quietly and expensively when that expertise is missing.

Three things worth taking from this if you run a business in North London, or anywhere else:

Your own experience is the thing AI needs, not the thing it replaces. The most useful AI tool in your business is the one that takes your existing knowledge and speeds it up, not the one you use because you do not have that knowledge yourself. If you would not trust a junior member of staff to send a client email without checking it, do not trust AI to do it unchecked either.

Cutting corners now often costs more later. Ford saved money by leaning on automation instead of experienced staff. It then spent three years and an unknown but clearly substantial sum rehiring and retraining to fix the fallout, on top of leading the US in recalls this year. The version of this on the high street is the AI generated website copy that has to be quietly rewritten a year later, or the automated customer service that drives a loyal client away.

One tool used well beats five tools used badly. Ford did not need “an AI strategy”. It needed its most experienced engineers pointed at one clear problem, quality control, with AI as the tool in their hands rather than the replacement for them. That is a smaller, more useful lesson for a business with one till and three staff than anything in the AI headlines about job losses.

Where To Start If You Are Not Ford

Start with the part of your business you already understand best, and use AI to take the admin off your hands, not the judgement. That might be drafting the first version of a newsletter you then edit, or summarising your invoices, rather than handing over decisions you would not want a stranger making unsupervised.

Ford had 350 salaries and three years to correct course. Most small businesses will not get that chance twice. The good news is you do not need Ford’s budget to get this right the first time. You need to know which one task is worth trying AI on, and to keep your own judgement in the loop while you do it.

That is genuinely the whole conversation I have with clients across Crouch End, Muswell Hill, and Highgate. Not “how do I build an AI strategy”, but “what is the one thing worth trying, and how do I make sure I am still the one checking it”.

Joe Sack is an AI consultant based in Crouch End, North London. He helps small businesses and independent professionals use AI without the overwhelm.