Automaker Ford Motor Co. recently made headlines when it announced it would rehire engineers to fix its failing artificial intelligence (AI) tools. “Artificial intelligence is a great tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of automotive hardware engineering, told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “Historically, we have not paid as much attention as we should to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers, who have been with us through many product cycles.”By the way, Ford isn’t the first company to announce that it made a mistake in cutting AI jobs. Others include IBM and Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In late 2025, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) laid off dozens of customer service employees and replaced them with AI voice bots. CBA confirmed the job cuts and said in a statement: “Our investments in technology, including AI, make it easier and faster for our customers to receive support, especially in our call centres.””However, the AI system reportedly failed to respond, leading to an increase in calls and prompting CBA to reverse the layoffs. The Commonwealth Bank has apologized and described its decision to abdicate its role to AI as a “mistake”. CBA admitted it had “failed to properly take into account all relevant business considerations” when announcing the job cuts and admitted it “should have carried out a more thorough assessment of the roles needed”. A bank spokesperson added: “We are also reviewing our internal processes to improve our approach going forward.” CBA also said it found that customer service roles were not duplicated despite the introduction of AI-powered “voice bots” and apologized to affected employees. Affected employees were given the choice of continuing in their current roles, pursuing reassignment within the bank, or retiring from CBA. The Australian Financial Sector Union said in a statement. “Getting CBA to reverse these layoffs is a huge victory, but the damage has already been done to the 45 colleagues who have had to endure the stress and anxiety of facing the cuts, some of whom have been with the bank for decades but are suddenly faced with the prospect of not being able to pay their bills.” The union said in a statement:
Ford rehires engineers after AI layoffs
American automaker Ford announced earlier this week that it has hired 350 veteran engineers over the past three years to help address seemingly intractable quality issues that have cost the automaker billions of dollars. Many of them were former employees or suppliers. As a result, Ford is the top mainstream brand in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Study. As quoted in a Bloomberg report, Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra said these engineers were “central figures” in Ford’s efforts to improve quality issues. They are currently holding mandatory meetings to rigorously troubleshoot quality issues and reprogramming their AI tools to avoid glitches before they occur.“We were relying more and more on automated quality systems,” but they weren’t getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We’ve brought back technical experts,” and “they look for failures before the parts even reach the factory floor.”
