Get The Robot Out Of The Human
I’m on a mission to eliminate robotic work from human jobs and identify the hidden “Robot Tax” (the thousands of hours smart people spend doing stupid work) that we’re all paying!
The Get TROOTH motto? Let robots handle the repeatable. Let humans lead the remarkable.
The Mission
Work is stealing your life. I’m here to help you get it back.
Smart people spend hours each week doing work a computer should handle, or work nobody should be doing in the first place.
Take Sarah. During close, she downloads a CSV from the ERP, copies last month’s Excel file, renames the copy for the current month, and pastes the new financials into an already bloated data tab labeled “DO NOT TOUCH.” Then she copies the formulas down, rolls forward 37 linked tabs so every report points to the new month, and copies the finished tables into PowerPoint.
The numbers do not tie. Accounting added three new accounts without telling her, and a major vendor now appears under two different spellings. Sarah fixes both problems, reruns the workbook, and refreshes the deck.
By then, the clock says 7:45 p.m. She has run the process three times today.
The work feels ordinary because Sarah has repeated it month after month without complaining. Close has to get done. Everyone else sees the finished deck. Sarah sees the hours it took to make the systems agree.
The cost is buried in G&A on the P&L. No line item says Sarah spent the dinner hour fixing a vendor name so two systems would agree. The cost also shows up in her frustration at becoming an “un-HAPI,” an unintended Human API connecting the company’s ERP to management reporting.
I’m on a mission to find out why this work still exists, what belongs to a robot, and where a human’s knowledge and judgment fit in.
THE PHILOSOPHY
What I Believe
When humans are forced to behave like predictable machines, the robot hasn’t
been automated — it’s been internalized.
Let robots handle the repeatable. Let humans lead the remarkable.
AI can write the email. It can’t repair the relationship. Use automation to buy back the human moments your job keeps trying to steal.
Get the robot out of the human.
You’re not a robot. Stop working like one. Automate the soul-crushing repetitive work and free yourself for what really matters.
AI-proof your career.
AI isn’t the threat. Ignoring it is. The people who learn to work WITH automation now will be indispensable. The ones who don’t? Replaceable.
The Details
You know this work because you live it.
Every forecast cycle, Z sends a planning template to twelve department leaders and waits for twelve slightly different versions to come back. One inserts new columns. Another hard-codes the totals. A third still uses last quarter’s cost-center names. Z cleans each file, reconciles headcount to HR, maps the expenses back to the chart of accounts, and loads everything into the master forecast before leadership sees the numbers. Leadership sees one forecast. Z sees twelve incompatible inputs and a deadline.
An automated consolidation runs at 2:00 a.m. Priya opens the output at 9:00, checks whether every entity loaded, compares revenue and expense totals with the ERP, reruns a failed allocation, and traces one unexplained variance to a file saved in the wrong folder. The system says the job completed. Priya knows complete and correct are two different things.
Jennifer keeps the CRM, billing system, and ERP aligned for revenue recognition. She knows which contracts include implementation fees, usage charges, or unusual payment terms, which amendments changed the accounting treatment, and which invoices do not match the usage reports and why. When Sales, Billing, and Accounting each hold a different version of the deal, Jennifer finds the signed contract, resolves the differences, and makes sure the revenue schedule reflects what the company promised and delivered. The architecture diagram shows three systems. Jennifer is not one of them.
When one person holds finance together through memory, judgment, and manual fixes, the company has built an interface out of a person. I call that person an un-HAPI – an unintended Human Application Programming Interface.
YOUR ROBOT TAX AUDITOR
Robot Tax Auditor? What’s that?
ROBOT TAX
Get TROOTH calls this often-manual, judgment-heavy work connecting systems Robot Tax. Robot Tax is human intelligence, time, and energy consumed by work technology should handle, or work the organization should stop doing.
Some tasks are easy to classify. Copying, moving, renaming, refreshing, re-entering, and monitoring follow predictable rules. A person adds no judgment during those steps. Instead, they supply patience.
Other tasks look repetitive but carry knowledge and judgment. Sarah notices when a number looks wrong. Jennifer knows which customer follows a different pattern. Z knows the source file arrived on time but still contains last month’s data. Those moments deserve a human.
The line between those kinds of work is where automation projects tend to fail because they don’t ask a critical question: What should the robot take, and what should the human keep? Instead, they simply try to automate it all, which, in the end, just makes wrong work faster.
SOMETIMES THE INTEGRATION IS A PERSON
An un-HAPI is an unintended Human Application Programming Interface. The name sounds silly. The job feels less funny when vacation requests depend on whether two systems know how to speak without Sarah in the middle.
An un-HAPI translates, remembers, reconciles, chases, fixes and explains. Their judgment has value. The arrangement carries risk. A company should value Sarah’s knowledge without requiring Sarah to behave like middleware.
MEET THE AUDITOR
My name is Beverly Brandt. I am a solution architect and former novelist with a habit of asking what happens, who does the work, and which facts don’t not fit the explanation.
I wrote ten published novels and three novellas before returning my attention to business. The genres changed. The habit stayed. People form theories, act on incomplete information, and revise the story when reality refuses to cooperate. Business does the same thing, but with more spreadsheets.
I appointed myself Robot Tax Auditor because no one else appeared eager to claim the title. My job is to find smart humans doing machine-like work, learn why the work exists, and separate the steps technology should own from the judgment people should keep.