Ford has rehired or recruited about 350 veteran engineers — some of them former employees and others hired from suppliers — after the company’s AI-driven quality inspection systems failed to match the expertise of experienced human workers, company executives said this week.

Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, told reporters that the automaker had wrongly assumed that deploying artificial intelligence across its manufacturing operations would automatically improve quality.

“Artificial intelligence is a fantastic tool, but it’s only as good as the information you use to train it,” Poon said, according to Bloomberg. “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.”

The company had rolled out 900 AI-powered cameras in its plants to detect quality issues, Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra told investors in an October earnings call. The automated systems were part of a broader push that saw Ford CEO Jim Farley state in an interview last June that “AI will leave a lot of white collar people behind.”

Poon said the AI systems lacked the training and expertise of veteran technicians, many of whom had left the company before their knowledge could be used to improve the technology. The automated tools failed to deliver the expected quality level, he said.

“We recognized that for us to enhance some of our automation and machine learning and artificial intelligence tools we needed to ensure that they were trained by the most experienced individuals,” Poon said, per Bloomberg.

Ford has since brought back experienced workers — referred to internally as “gray beards,” according to sources cited by TechCrunch — to train the AI systems and mentor younger employees. The company hired, recruited, or promoted about 350 veteran engineers, it said in a press release, describing them as carrying “the hard-earned wisdom of decades of design.”

“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,” Poon said.

The quality push extends beyond rehiring. Ford said it replaced senior leaders across engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing as part of what it called a “significant talent refresh.” The moves coincide with Ford returning to the top of the U.S. JD Power Initial Quality Study, a ranking it last held in 2010.