Airflow in Action: Model Training with PBs of New Data Weekly. DataOps & MLOps Insights from Ford

Ford Motor Company has been a pioneer in the automotive industry, and recently, it increased its investments in AI and ML to improve customer experience, power its smart mobility strategy, and foster advances across the broader automotive industry. The company's ML engineers have leveraged Apache Airflow and Astro, a managed service from Astronomer, to process large amounts of data weekly, run parallel workflows, and reduce errors while accelerating AI model development for autonomous driving systems. Ford's journey with AI and ML was shaped by significant organizational and technical hurdles, but the establishment of its Artificial Intelligence Advancement Center and the development of specialized platforms like FordLLM have helped address these issues. The company has now transitioned to Airflow for its Mach1ML platform, which provides a robust orchestration tool that can handle hybrid setups and scale effectively, enabling faster time-to-value for ML solutions and reduced operational overhead.