How Ford and CI&T Used AI to Speed Up Warehouse Modernization Across South America
Ford and CI&T expanded Wings, Ford's parts and warehouse management platform, across South America faster than planned. By embedding AI throughout delivery, they cut the timeline by two months and shipped features that fit local needs with higher accuracy.
The work balanced speed with stability. Teams adapted the platform for tax rules across nine warehouses, upskilled on a legacy codebase of 550,000+ lines, and ran development and support in parallel to keep operations steady while shipping new capabilities.
What changed
- Delivery finished two months sooner while improving feature precision for local markets.
- Compliance addressed across nine warehouses, reducing rollout risk.
- Three integrated teams combined build and run to avoid throughput stalls.
- Faster knowledge transfer across a large, aging codebase.
How AI was applied end-to-end
- CI&T FLOW, the company's AI management system, worked with Ford's proprietary LLM to surface insights, consolidate critical information, and automate repeatable tasks.
- More than 4,800 minutes of meetings were analyzed and 50,000 lines of transcripts processed to speed onboarding, clarify decisions, and keep development phases coherent.
- Local requirements were mapped and implemented with higher accuracy and less rework.
Why this matters for managers
- Speed and quality can improve together when AI is embedded into discovery, planning, and delivery-not just support.
- Integrated teams (build + run) cut handoffs and protect uptime during major changes.
- Compliance-first delivery avoids expensive revisions late in the rollout.
- Systematic knowledge capture (meetings, docs, code) reduces onboarding time and decision thrash.
A practical playbook you can reuse
- Stand up a single, integrated team across business, engineering, and support. Shared metrics; shared cadence.
- Automate context capture. Record and transcribe key meetings; let AI summarize decisions, owners, and risks.
- Pair your LLM with an AI management layer to control prompts, security, and quality checks.
- Run delivery and production support in parallel with clear SLOs so new features don't degrade operations.
- Front-load compliance and localization with AI-assisted rule mapping to reduce late-stage churn.
- Track measurable outcomes: delivery time saved, rework rate, defect leakage, and adoption by site.
Results at a glance
- Timeline: 2 months faster
- Coverage: 9 warehouses across the region
- Legacy scope: 550,000+ lines of code
- Knowledge ops: 4,800+ minutes analyzed; 50,000 lines of transcripts processed
About CI&T
CI&T (NYSE: CINT) partners with large enterprises and fast-growth clients across AI, strategy, customer experience, software development, cloud, and data. With 30 years in market and 8,000+ professionals in 10 countries, the company's AI management system, CI&T FLOW, helps teams deliver faster and at scale.
Further reading
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