Humans are still in the driving seat, says Ford’s AI chief Bell

Bell emphasised that the company views AI as a tool to augment human capabilities rather than replace them, noting that the technology still has limitations such as errors and incomplete reasoning.

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Ford Motor Co is integrating artificial intelligence (AI) across functions—be it in the design studio or on the factory floor—to turn “manual hours” into “pushes of a button,” while keeping human expertise firmly in the driver’s seat, the 120-year-old automaker’s chief data, AI and analytics officer Franziska Bell told ET.The use cases span design, engineering, quality assurance, customer support, data management, and software development, and most of these cutting-edge advancements are being through teams in Chennai and Bengaluru.“Ford has already deployed artificial intelligence at scale across our entire product life cycle,” Bell said. “Our strategy is really human AI teams. We believe in augmenting humans through artificial intelligence. The human is very much still in the driver’s seat and can move forward at a much faster pace and also provide more variations than would have been possible previously.” She said that artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough for full automation of entire jobs and still faces challenges such as hallucinations.“I believe in the ingenuity of humans,” Bell said. “The strategy we have developed therefore is really a collaboration where we want to harness the best of both worlds—human ingenuity, subject matter expertise (and) logical reasoning, with the computational power of AI, which is very good at finding patterns in very large volumes of data.” The company has developed use cases that include co-designing a car, going from a manual sketch to a 2D or 3D rendering in the blink of an eye.“We can generate hundreds of variations at a push of a button and this really elevates our designers to executive directors,” Bell said.

“We do this not only for the exterior but also for the interior (of the car). We do this also for intricate wheel designs as well. Traditionally, you would start off with a small human-drawn sketch.” That drawing may not be required either.

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