Many veterans applying for benefits need a record from The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) National Personnel Record Center to prove their eligibility. But most of those records are paper-based, which severely limited how quickly they could be processed remotely, and by 2023, requests for Official Military Personnel Files alone had grown to 530,000.
That backlog meant waiting. Staff could process only 30 to 50 records a day by hand, so a veteran's request could sit for months before anyone even got to it, time spent waiting on something they'd already earned.
Staff now get personnel records located and processed in 1 to 3 minutes. That same work used to take a full day, and covered far fewer records. Fearless and SoftRams built the proof-of-concept bots that made the difference.
Staff can rely on the bots locating the right record correctly 90 to 95% of the time, proof that automation didn't have to trade accuracy for speed, just deliver the same trustworthy results the old manual process did, far faster.
If a record is unreadable or something goes wrong, staff get an automatic alert with the reason why, instead of an error disappearing silently into the system. A person stays in the loop exactly when one is needed.