A mechanic at a Ford dealership who has never pulled the engine from a Super Duty pickup can now follow instructions from artificial intelligence (AI) through the job. Removing the engine alone takes about two days, Ford CEO Jim Farley said at a media roundtable during the company’s Ford Pro Accelerate event in Detroit, according to a Wednesday (Sept. 30) report from Fortune.
“They’re good mechanics, they just don’t know,” Farley said. Ford Pro, the automaker’s commercial vehicle unit, uses AI to help dealer technicians who have never done the engine removal work through it. The mechanic still turns the wrench. The AI supplies the steps. That is a far gentler role for AI than the one Farley sketched in 2025, when he said the technology would “replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
The know-how those mechanics lack has taken years to build. Learning to pull a diesel engine from a Super Duty takes at least five years, and Ford had 5,000 open mechanic jobs, Farley said in a podcast interview in November, Fortune reported. Manufacturers are betting AI can shrink that timeline.
Rockwell Says AI Cut Technician Training to 3 Months
New technicians at Rockwell Automation’s Singapore plant learn to troubleshoot hundreds of machines in three months instead of nine, according to chief supply chain officer Bob Buttermore in a Sept. 24 interview with Microsoft. Microsoft credited the improvement to the generative AI-powered Maintenance Copilot, an in-house AI assistant that technicians have used since October 2025.
When a machine throws an error, the copilot organizes what it finds by the problem, cause and reaction, with the most likely causes up front. It draws on a database built by Rockwell engineers with 20 to 30 years on the shop floor, plus equipment manuals and manufacturing software data, Microsoft detailed. The software runs on Microsoft’s Azure platform.
Machine downtime at the plant fell 33%, plant director Li Wang said. Servicing and spare-parts costs are down about 25%, based on Rockwell’s internal tracking, Microsoft reported.
The plant joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network in June. It shortened time-to-competency 67% using more than 50 digital and AI solutions, the organization said. The copilot is one of several AI tools behind those gains, Wang said.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
BCG Sees AI Lifting Technician Profit Up to 80%
Rockwell’s results point to a bigger opportunity across field service. AI could raise field-service productivity 20% to 30% and lift profit per technician by as much as 80%, according to Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Technician time is often lost to inefficient routing, unavailable parts and insufficient troubleshooting support, the firm said. In one BCG client case, a large European rail operator used the firm’s platform to give maintenance technicians extended reality glasses. Within a month, experienced workers improved task efficiency 20% and newer technicians gained nearly 30%, BCG reported in July 2025.
About 70% of the value comes from change management rather than code, BCG said in its 2026 report. New business models could follow, such as outcomes-as-a-service, where customers pay for uptime.
Manufacturers Scale AI Built on Veteran Know-How
Rockwell built its copilot to keep the expertise veteran workers take with them when they retire, which Wang called “tribal knowledge.” The plant also wanted a single standard approach to each problem, no matter which technician handles it, Wang said.
Other manufacturers are taking a similar approach. DCM Shriram, India’s largest single-site caustic soda producer, deployed a gen AI-enabled maintenance manager among 45 advanced solutions, the World Economic Forum said in its June Lighthouse announcement. A Sinopharm-owned traditional Chinese medicine plant in Chongqing joined the same cohort after capturing workers’ tacit production knowledge digitally.
Rockwell, which operates more than 25 plants, tests tools like the copilot in its own factories before offering them to manufacturers, Buttermore said. Next, the copilot will roll out to Rockwell’s plant in Twinsburg, Ohio, and to plants in Poland and Mexico.
Add as Preferred Source
