Automaker Ford Motor recently hit headlines when the company announced that it is rehiring engineers to fix its artificial intelligence (AI) tools that weren’t getting the job done. “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 on a call Wednesday. “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.”Incidentally, Ford is not the first company to say that it made an AI layoffs error. There are others including IBM and Australia’s largest bank — Commonwealth Bank of Australia. In late 2025, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) laid off dozens of customer service employees and replaced them with an AI voice bot. Confirming the job cuts, CBA said in a statement, “Our investment in technology, including AI, is making it easier and faster for customers to get help, especially in our call centres.“However, the AI system was reportedly unable to cope, which led to an increase in calls, prompting CBA to reverse the job cuts. Commonwealth Bank apologised, describing its decision to axe roles due to AI as an “error”. CBA admitted it “did not adequately consider all relevant business considerations” when announcing the redundancies and acknowledged “we should have been more thorough in our assessment of the roles required”. A bank spokesperson added, “We are also reviewing our internal processes to improve our approach going forward.” CBA further said that it had apologised to the affected employees after finding the customer service roles were not redundant despite introducing an AI-powered “voice-bot”. Impacted employees were given the choice to continue in their current roles, pursue redeployment within the bank or proceed with leaving CBA. Australia’s finance sector union said in a statement. “Getting CBA to rescind these job cuts is a massive win – but the damage has already been done for our 45 colleagues who have had to endure the stress and worry of facing redundancy, some of whom have been with the bank for decades and were suddenly confronted with the prospect of being unable to pay their bills.” said the union in a statement.
Ford rehires engineers after AI layoffs
Earlier this week American automaker Ford announced that over the last three years, the company has hired 350 veteran engineers, many of them former employees and others from suppliers, to help address seemingly intractable quality woes that have cost the automaker billions. The result: Ford is the top mainstream brand in the latest JD Power Initial Quality Survey. Those engineers were “at the heart” of Ford’s efforts to turn around quality problems, said Kumar Galhotra, chief operating officer, as quoted in a Bloomberg report. They now run mandatory meetings that rigorously troubleshoot quality problems and they have reprogrammed AI tools to head off glitches before they happen.“We had been relying more and more on automated quality systems” and not getting the desired results, Galhotra said. “We brought back technical specialists” and “they hunt for failure points before a part ever reaches the plant floor.”
