AI is a defining feature of our time, but it has been quietly influencing a staple of American life – the United States Postal Service – for decades before the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI came along and companies starting plunking down hundred of billions on chips and data centers.
Way back in 1965, USPS became the first US government entity to operationalize AI in the form of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to improve the ability of sorting machines to read handwritten addresses. OCR describes an automated process where images of text documents are scanned and converted into an editable, digital format.
A scan creates a visual record for OCR software to extract relevant information to accelerate mail processing. This technique greatly reduces the need for manual data entry, freeing up staff to use their energy in more efficient ways. No piece of technology is perfect, but its use is so normalized that OCR machines now read nearly 98 percent of hand-addressed letters and over 99 percent of machine-printed mail. USPS, AI pioneer.
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