Ford Motor Co. has installed IBM's AI-powered Maximo Visual Inspection technology at 17 of its North American manufacturing facilities. Ford calls the system internally its Mobile AI Vision System, or MAIVS, and according to the automaker it has been used to perform 150 million inspections that flagged 400,000 quality issues a human worker may have missed. Ford says it has over 1,000 operator workstations deployed at its North American factories.
“We needed to give our operators superpowers to see the unseen in real time, and that’s where MAIVS comes into play,” said Jason Barger, Ford’s advanced manufacturing IT vision systems and cyber security product manager.
The computer vision-based inspection technology is helping Ford reduce warranty claims by identifying and fixing assembly line defects, as well as avoid higher rework labor and repair costs to correct issues after a vehicle is fully built. Barger said that if a connector is not fully seated within the station and the vehicle makes it to the end of the line, several hours of heavy repair may be needed to get to the one-second fix of that connector.
Ford started its partnership with IBM in 2020. Barger and IBM principal automation specialist Ed Neubecker described the system at the 2026 AutoTech conference in Novi, Michigan.
As a vehicle moves along the line, an operator workstation equipped with an iPhone first identifies the VIN and vehicle build complexity, then prepares the device to photograph a particular area of interest, from door panel components to electrical connections and wiring routing. The system also supports standard internet protocol cameras. Ford collects both good and bad images to train machine learning models, which are deployed to the iPhones, where the system runs inference on each image and sends pass/fail results in real time. When an issue such as an unseated electrical connector is flagged, it is logged into Ford’s Quality Operating System for corrective action; an operator can fix the defect on the spot, an in-station process coach closes the concern and clears the vehicle for release, and Ford can also stop the production line.
Barger said Ford installed 40 new inspection systems this year alone at its manufacturing facilities in Michigan. At its Kentucky Truck Plant, Ford added 1,200 inspections, 203 new inspectors, 72 new technology tests and six times the number of AI-powered inspection tools for the 2026 Expedition SUV compared to last year’s model launch.