Some Companies Facing AI Woes

Some interesting changes to the AI landscape. You may have noticed reports last week that Ford Motor Corporation was forced to rehire 300 engineers when it learned that they actually couldn't be replaced by AI. 

    "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that that would produce a high-quality product," said Charles Poon, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, said in a press briefing, according to The Verge. 

    Additionally, Bloomberg reported Poon saying on a press call that artificial intelligence is a "fantastic tool," but only as good as the information you use to train it. 

    "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," Bloomberg reported him saying. "Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high quality product."      

Ford isn't the only company having second thoughts about AI. CNBC reports that "[o]ther companies that have walked back their hiring plans to focus more on human capital include Commonwealth Bank of Australia and software giant IBM."

    These examples echo views presented by analysts that making employees redundant while using more AI may not necessarily offer the best route to business growth.

    “Budgeting on ‘tech to replace humans’ without investing in training or upskilling left teams unprepared to leverage AI,” according to a report by Intuition Labs. “Notably, among companies pushing automation, many later ‘regretted’ layoffs, having cut the very people needed to oversee AI,” it added.

    According to a report by Orgvue, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment. However, among that number, 55% admit wrong decisions about those redundancies were made.  

    And then there are the unforeseen costs for heavy use of AI. Forbes reports that "AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced." That article relates:

    Something odd is happening in the tech world right now: the technology that was supposed to make human labour obsolete is, at this moment, more expensive than the humans it was meant to replace. Companies are laying off workers to fund the very AI tools that cost more than the workers they just let go. The circular logic of it would be darkly comic if tens of thousands of livelihoods weren't caught in the middle.

    Uber’s CTO, recently disclosed that the company burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. By March, 84 percent of Uber's engineers had adopted Claude Code, and roughly 70 percent of committed code now originates with AI. The usage was enormous. The corresponding value was murkier. Uber's COO and President, Andrew Macdonald, conceded publicly that token usage didn't seem to correlate directly with useful features shipped to users.

    Uber is not an outlier. Microsoft, which has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI and writes up to 30 percent of its own code with generative AI, instructed engineers in a major division to stop using an AI coding assistant because the bills became untenable. One unnamed company, per Axios, ran up a $500 million Claude bill in a single month after management forgot to set a usage cap. These are structural miscalculations about what intelligence costs when you purchase it by the syllable.