Remember when your biggest data problem was organizing your iPhone photos? Well, Ancestry’s CTO Sriram Thiagarajan would like a word. This guy’s sitting on 65 billion records from 80+ countries – that’s roughly 10,000 terabytes of “who married whom and when they died” data. To put that in perspective, that’s enough storage to make your Netflix downloads look like a rounding error.
Here’s where it gets interesting (and slightly terrifying): Ancestry used to need nine whole months to digitize something like the 1940 census. Nine months! That’s longer than it takes to make a human, and probably cost about as much too.
But then AI entered the chat.
Back in 2017, when Thiagarajan joined the team, they were basically running a digital sweatshop – scanning records, then paying humans to manually type out every “John Smith born 1892” entry. It was expensive, slow, and about as exciting as watching paint dry on a rainy Tuesday.
Fast forward to 2021, and boom – they’ve got their own computer vision tech that can read great-great-grandma’s chicken scratch handwriting better than you can read your own grocery list. The result? That nine-month slog became a nine-day sprint. At a fraction of the cost.
Now, before you start panicking about AI taking over the world, Ancestry still has humans double-checking the work. “We want to be extra careful that what we produce using AI is grounded in truth,” Thiagarajan says. Because apparently, even AI can get confused when trying to decipher whether that smudge says “Miller” or “Killer.”
But wait, there’s more! (I know, I sound like a late-night infomercial, but stick with me.)
They’re now beta-testing something called Audio Stories – basically AI that can take your dusty old family records and turn them into a podcast-worthy narrative. Imagine your phone reading you bedtime stories about how your ancestor survived the potato famine, complete with dramatic pauses.
“Our AI can understand the context between printed material, images, and handwritten narratives, and tie it all together into a story,” Thiagarajan explains. Translation: AI is getting really good at being your family historian.
The bigger picture here isn’t just about family trees – it’s about how AI is quietly revolutionizing the grunt work that makes modern life possible. While everyone’s arguing about ChatGPT writing college essays, companies like Ancestry are using AI to solve actual problems that would otherwise require armies of people with really good eyesight and infinite patience.
And honestly? If AI can help me figure out why my great-uncle twice-removed was apparently a “chicken inspector” in 1923, I’m here for it. Just don’t ask me to explain what that job actually entailed.
The future is weird, folks. But at least it’s efficiently weird.