“We’re Team Human” - Ford Hired Back 350 Engineers They Fired Due to AI

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:00)
Ford is rehiring human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks. What?
This is a BBC story. By the way, this is a good story for Team Human. Man, we're making a comeback. They're not gonna ship us out.
They're not gonna ship us out, and PBD Podcast is around by, hi, this is Patrick Bet-David. Today, I'm gonna talk to Jeff Snyder. You know, today, Tom Ellsworth. No, it ain't gonna happen. Humans are protected. Ford's realizing it. Let me read this to you. Ford says it has hired some human engineers. Can you imagine? We have to say human engineers. Just say engineers. We used to just say human engineers, just engineers.
After AI failed to master skill and experience and a bit to reap the benefits of the tech which developers claim can cut costs and boost productivity, the US carmaker adopted it across some parts of its operators, including for quality checks. But according to Bloomberg, its executive said the firm has rehired more than 300 veteran quality inspectors in recent years to make up for the pitfalls of the automated systems. Team Human, baby, we're making a comeback. We're making a comeback. AI is a fantastic tool, but it is only as good as the information you can retrain it. Charles Poon, VP of Vehicle Hardware Engineering told reporters 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. The US automaker is among to have seized on the buzz around AI, particularly in the middle of Wall Street, fervor around the tech's potential to increase margins. AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind. Ford's boss, Jim Farley, great name, said in an interview with author Walter Isaacson last June, in an October earning calls, Chief Operating Officer Kumar said the firm was deploying AI across the entire industrial platform. This included rolling out 900 AI-powered cameras in its plans to detect quality issues. But Poon told reporters on Wednesday, the firm's AI-driven checks had failed to live up to expectations. Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing AI and ingesting the design requirements that we had that would produce a high-quality product. Poon reportedly pointed to automated tools lacking the training and experience of a veteran technician, many of whom, he said, had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve its tech. Tom, love this story, your thoughts on this. I'm buying another Ford. If they go back to Team Human, I'm telling you.

**Tom Ellsworth** (2:31)
Exactly. So what happens here is a bad design is a bad design. And if the AI has got a bad design or design that's got flaws, it doesn't fix anything. And so that's a part of an engineer. What is engineer? Engineer is an inventor, a designer, an inventor. And guess what? Some don't work, then you go into testing.
And what this is pointing out is they tried to put it in the quality side of it, but there was some... we just wanted to ingest this data into quality, and the AI was unable to replicate the human. And so I think what it shows is that this rush to put AI on everything, finishing tasks like this, you know, where you have the physical world, it's not happening. I'm seeing more and more and more and more and more feedback and case studies on AI saved me time, collecting data, analyzing it and getting it to a point, then I used it. So it compresses that part of my workday by giving me, hey, here's an assessment.
It's like... what is Pomp's thing? CFO Sophia or whatever it is, where it compresses the time to find a list of things that now you need to go take a look at in terms of your budget and stuff. Well, now I got to go in there. It doesn't do it for you. Now you go in there, you save the hour of compiling it, and now you have a list of things that you're going to go after. And I think that's AI at its best. Here it's just showing that AI is not coming for every job. And I think this is good news. You have, we covered it and I'll mention it again, the number of software engineer job openings right now is up year over year, and it's not up by a small number. But they're in different places now. They're in DevOps, they're in quality, and they're in areas where all of this code is getting created. Now we need humans to come out, babysit the code and look at end products and see how the functionality is. So for all these, you say this company laid off a thousand software engineers, they're showing up in the one ads to apply their engineering skill in a different way. It's like...