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

Ford’s strategy behind hiring 350 “gray beard” engineers focuses on pairing AI with veteran expertise to improve quality and productivity. Over the past three years, the automaker hired 350 veteran engineers—former Ford employees and supplier workers—to train juniors and to reprogram AI tools that weren’t effective. Ford vice president Charles Poon said AI is only as good as the data used for training, and that prior efforts did not sufficiently leverage the experience of long-tenured engineers. The company says these engineers function as “internal auditors,” running weekly peer design reviews to identify failure points before designs reach factories. Ford also describes an AI vision system using off-the-shelf smartphones, deployed across 33 plants with more than 1,000 cameras performing millions of inspections. Ford reported recalls costing $4.8 billion annually by mid-2024, but it later ranked No. 1 in JD Power Initial Quality.