01/20/2026
Good morning — I wanted to share something with you.
A lot of folks are talking about AI these days: how it might take jobs, how scary it is, all that fun stuff. So here’s a real-world example from our shop.
For the last 25 years, we’ve relied on original Volkswagen microfiche illustrations to correctly identify parts for our website and customers. While the part numbers themselves are still valid, the original microfiche sheets have been scratched, faded, and worn over time. Unfortunately, modern parts catalogs don’t show many of these components anymore because they’ve long been discontinued — which makes the old microfiche essential.
Traditional OCR (character recognition) software has never been able to accurately read these tables. Because of that, for decades we’ve had to visually inspect the microfiche and manually transcribe the information into spreadsheets. It’s slow, tedious work, and it’s one of the main reasons our website doesn’t yet list every single part number we support.
Recently, I’ve been using ChatGPT in different parts of the business — writing estimates, proposals, customer emails, and long, complicated correspondence. More recently, I started uploading scanned microfiche images and having it assist with accurate, structured transcription into a digital format. From there, those tables can be converted into CSV files and uploaded directly into the backend of our website.
To put the time savings into perspective: if we were to manually transcribe each microfiche sheet by hand, we’d easily be looking at thousands of hours of data entry. This is a great example of how AI can provide real, practical value to a small business — and ultimately to the Volkswagen Bus community as a whole.
Thanks, as always, for your continued support and patience with our parts catalog. Getting the correct fit has always mattered to us, and this helps us do that better than ever.
Surprise:
This text was created with the help of ChatGPT.
