This article by John Kell in Business Insider describes how Ancestry has replaced its manual record-indexing process with AI and large language models (LLMs).
Starting with internal experiments in 2014, the company’s content has grown from 800 million new records in 2021 to over 18 billion in 2023. By late 2025, over 50% of the historical records published on its site were generated via AI. Automated handwritten document transcription, photo facial recognition, and narrated family history stories have been made available through AI.