The High Cost of Using MBAs as Human OCR Engines

The High Cost of Using MBAs as Human OCR Engines

When the sharpest minds are chained to the most tedious tasks, the organization isn’t just inefficient-it’s committing intellectual malpractice.

Shifting the cursor exactly three millimeters to the left, Marcus clicks the ‘Amount Due’ field on the PDF, highlights the digits, and pastes them into the internal database for the 145th time this afternoon. He has an MBA from a top-tier school that cost him $155,000 and two years of his life. He was hired to perform risk analysis, to look at the market trends that would define the next 5 years of the firm’s growth, and to navigate the complexities of modern liquidity. Instead, he is a glorified copy-paste machine.

His eyes are slightly bloodshot, reflecting the fluorescent overheads that hum at a frequency only those in deep state of boredom can truly hear. This is the quiet catastrophe of the modern white-collar workplace: we have spent decades refining our hiring processes to find the absolute sharpest minds, only to chain them to tasks that a reasonably programmed script could handle in 5 seconds.

The Epitome of Misunderstanding

I realized recently that I have been saying the word ‘epitome’ incorrectly in my head for nearly 25 years. I thought it was ‘epi-tome,’ like a very large book about an epic. I said it out loud during a strategy session last month, and the silence that followed was heavy enough to crush a ribcage. It was a humbling moment, a reminder that we can be incredibly ‘educated’ and still fundamentally misunderstand the tools we use every day.

We do the same thing with our staff. We assume that because a human is doing a job, the job is being done ‘humanely’ or ‘intelligently.’ But there is nothing intelligent about a finance professional manually verifying addresses on 45 invoices an hour. It is a waste of biological processing power that borders on the criminal.

— Author Insight

We talk about the ‘future of work’ as if it’s this distant, glowing city on a hill, fueled by AI and leisure. We attend seminars on ‘upskilling’ and ‘reskilling,’ yet we refuse to automate the very tasks that drain the curiosity out of our workforce.

Recursive Futility and the Cult of Oversight

Taylor L.-A., a wilderness survival instructor I met during a particularly grueling week in the Cascades, once told me that the quickest way to die in the woods isn’t a bear or a cliff. It’s ‘recursive futility.’ It’s the act of doing something that doesn’t work, realizing it doesn’t work, and then doing it again because you don’t know what else to do. In the wilderness, that might mean trying to light wet wood for 35 minutes until hypothermia sets in. In the office, it’s the manual entry of data.

Bad Solution

2 MBAs

Checking Typing

VS

Better Solution

1 Algorithm

Handling Verification

We see the errors-the transposed digits that cost the company $85,000 in a single bad wire transfer-and our solution is usually to add ‘more oversight.’ We add another smart person to check the first smart person’s typing. Now you have two MBAs doing the work of zero algorithms.

The Hidden Cost: Atrophy of Skill

🤖

Human as Robot

Marcus clicks 855 times/hour.

🧠

Skill Atrophy

Risk analysis ability diminishes.

📉

Lost Value

Cost of disengagement is 35% salary.

I’ve seen this play out in 25 different departments across 5 different industries. The leadership team buys a complex software suite that promises ‘end-to-end integration,’ but the last mile of data-the messy, unformatted, unpredictable data from the outside world-remains the responsibility of the junior staff. They are the ‘bridge’ in the system. But humans make terrible bridges. We are meant to be the architects, not the planks.

Take the factoring industry, for example. This is where specialized platforms like best invoice factoring software come into play, specifically designed to handle the heavy lifting of data and workflow so that the people involved can actually use their brains for decision-making rather than data-shoveling.

We are essentially burning fine mahogany to keep a room warm when there is a furnace right there in the corner.

— Analogy for Waste

The Single Point of Failure Paradox

I once spent 15 hours over a weekend trying to fix a spreadsheet that had been corrupted by a single manual entry error. One digit. One person who was probably thinking about their grocery list or their kid’s soccer practice instead of ‘Column AQ.’ I wasn’t even mad at the person who made the mistake; I was mad at the system that allowed a human to be a single point of failure for something so trivial.

Computer (Flies Planes)

Human (Reads PDF)

We trust computers for the complex, but rely on fragile human input for the trivial.

It’s a paradox of the modern age: we trust computers to fly planes and perform surgery, but we don’t trust them to read a PDF invoice. We insist on ‘human touch’ in places where the human touch is actually a contaminant.

Liberation, Not Threat

Taylor L.-A. would call this a ‘failure of kit.’ In survival terms, your kit is your gear, your tools, your preparation. If your kit is poorly maintained or ill-suited for the environment, you’re dead before you start. Most corporate ‘kits’ are still stuck in 1995. They are collections of fragmented tools held together by the manual labor of over-qualified individuals.

Cognitive Dissonance Detected

Told you are the future, assigned tasks a golden retriever could perform.

Talent Leakage Point

If Marcus is too tired from his 235th address verification of the day to think about how to optimize the department’s cash flow, the company has lost. You cannot build a culture of innovation on a foundation of drudgery.

We need to stop viewing automation as a threat to jobs and start viewing it as a liberation of talent. When a task can be done by a machine, it is an insult to ask a human to do it. It is a misuse of the most complex biological machine in the known universe.

Unlearn Drudgery. Reclaim Intelligence.

We have to unlearn the idea that manual labor equals productivity. Once the boring stuff is gone, we finally have to do the hard stuff: the thinking, the relating, the creating. That’s the work we were actually hired for.

45 Min

Manual Data Entry

5 Min

High-Level Analysis

If we want to keep the ‘smart people’ we hire, we have to give them work that requires them to be smart. Because at the end of the day, a company isn’t its database or its invoices. It’s the collective intelligence of its people. And right now, we’re letting that intelligence leak out, one Ctrl+V at a time, into the void of the mind-numbingly stupid.