Indiana launches ‘Captain Record,’ the AI tool that searches 100 years of state documents

The Indiana Secretary of State’s Office and Robert Fulk, its chief information officer, on Tuesday unveiled “Captain Record,” a generative artificial intelligence tool that allows users to search more than 100 years’ worth of state documents.

Captain Record, which uses Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini 2.0 tools, and the automation platform mavQ, allows users to search across 20 million pages of archived records from the secretary of state and its divisions of business services, securities and auto dealers. Captain Record can locate anything from a business registration from 1923 to a financial filing from last year.

The tool’s AI model, which responds to search queries made in plain language, provides filter and search functions for nearly 10 terabytes of state documents.

Fulk said the project took about six months to complete, including several weeks alone just to import the sheer number of records. Fulk said the model was trained to interpret everything from 100-year-old handwritten documents to typed records, while maintaining rigorous standards for data accuracy, integrity and security.

While the state already had most of its paper and microfiche records digitized by a vendor, Fulk said, the effort to upload records into the search tool will likely take another year to complete. The process, however, will never truly end as records are continually uploaded from the state’s online business portal.

“The beauty of AI now is you can train the AI bots on [the data] to find it, index that, understand them and really start turning that into some really cool stuff where you can interact with it, and turn that unstructured, locked-up data and information into living intelligence,” Fulk said. “So it’s kind of this living, breathing, growing thing.”

The Captain Record model, Fulk said, is completely private — meaning, data fed in will not go on to inform or train any other AI models. And while Captain Record is currently only available for internal use, he said the state hopes to make it publicly available after chatbot function is launched.

“It’s pretty cool, even though it’s old records. We’re doing this for a purpose, right? One is to provide the records, and second is to make it publicly facing and transparent,” Fulk said. “We’re going to train the chatbot to actually interpret and understand those documents. Just like in ChatGPT, you can actually converse with them. They can understand them. They can turn them into data.”

Fulk said his office is now training staff how to use the tool. The Indiana Secretary of State’s Office has released other chatbots, such as Liz, a virtual AI agent for the state’s business portal. But Fulk said executing this project, and working under Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales, has allowed him to apply his 28 years of experience working in the private sector in government.

“We’re really kind of pushing the limits on using this AI stuff,” he said. “… This is my first time in government, and I’m luckily working for the secretary. He lets me drive and wants to really have an impact, which lets me drive innovation and change even though we’re government. So I kind of bring that discipline, and I like to get stuff done in three-to-six-month timeframes, not in the three to five years time frame. And it’s fun.”