Something I've been thinking about "where do automations actually add value?"

I've been spending time learning how different people use AI and automation in their work, and one thing keeps coming up that I find interesting.

A lot of the conversation is about tools, which platform, which model, which integration, but the people who seem happiest with their results tend to talk less about the tools and more about what they decided not to automate.

A few ideas I've been figuring out are like:

The repetitive stuff isn't always the valuable stuff.

It's actually tempting to automate whatever feels annoying, but annoying and high impact are not always the same thing, sometimes the boring task that takes 15 minutes a day matters less than the one that quietly causes errors.

Time saved is easier to measure than mistakes avoided.

Saving hours is great and easy to point to, but a lot of the real value might be in the things that don't go wrong anymore, which is harder to see and easier to undervalue.

Starting small seems to beat starting smart.

The most solid setups I've seen didn't start with a big plan, they started with one small thing that worked, then grew from there.

I don't think there's one right answer here, a lot of it probably depends on the business and the person.

So I'm curious how others think about it, when you decide what to automate, what's your filter? time saved? frequency? something else? Genuinely interested in how people approach this.

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Something I've been thinking about "where do automations actually add value?"