A former Marine had an idea to help fellow veterans: AI helped him build it

Years ago, Gary Crull spent an entire day helping a homeless veteran find the right hospital and get assistance.

That experience stayed with him. Crull, who served in the Marine Corps and the Army National Guard and now works as a management and program analyst at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), recently built Battle Buddy, an AI agent that helps veterans, their families and caregivers make sense of federal, state and local benefits. The agent walks them through regulations and programs and often finds support people didn't even know they could get.

"It was exhausting," he remembers about his efforts trying to assist the fellow veteran. "If I had Battle Buddy during that time, I probably would have had more information right at the bat and probably had more direction."

Back then, there was no such tool. Now Crull, who isn't a professional developer, has built one himself. He's a leading member of the VA's Citizen Developers community: employees who aren't professional programmers but use Microsoft Power Platform, the VA's official citizen developer platform, to build low-code solutions to problems they see in their daily work.

Some 17 million U.S. veterans can apply for hundreds of benefits and services, covering everything from disability compensation and healthcare to education, housing, employment and support for their families and survivors.

Crull knows the system from the inside. After deploying to Iraq, he served the public at the Veterans Benefits Administration, worked with veterans in the court system and gained further insight through the Veterans Experience Office.

"I had all the information at my fingertips because I've experienced it on both ends of the spectrum … my biggest saying is that Battle Buddy is made by veterans for veterans," he says.

Crull built Battle Buddy with Microsoft Copilot Studio, a graphical, low-code studio for building and managing AI-powered agents and workflows. As he explored Copilot Studio for another project, he quickly realized the potential to bring the agent concept to life.

He built the knowledge base from a large collection of VA regulations, benefit information and other resources. He gathered thousands of discussions from veteran forums and compiled about 1,000 questions and answers, so the AI would learn both what veterans ask and how they ask it.

He later connected the agent to the federal regulations database, so changes could be reflected immediately, and to a VA system for location information. Crull trained Battle Buddy to understand the full veteran journey, from leaving military service to navigating hospital care, burial services and memorial agencies.

The agent could save veterans phone calls and trips to VA facilities and free up staff for more urgent cases. Some testers say they saved hours; others found information they had sought for more than a year.