Has automating a task ever ended up creating more manual work for your team?
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we tried automating a slow weekly process to save time, and at first, it seemed great.
but then small edge cases kept failing silently. we ended up having to double-check every single result manually anyway, which completely ruined the time savings.
how do you figure out if a task is actually worth automating or better left done by hand?
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For sure, I used to automate for a living, and sometimes it's just not worth it and indeed causes twice the amount of work.
A lot of AI tools as well, if you have an email drafter, instead of having to read 100 mails in your inbox, you now have to read 200, both the original email and the draft..
Yes, and what fixed it for us was making every automated step report what it did and where it stopped. The silent failure was the real cost, not the edge case. Now each job either finishes, repairs itself and logs the repair, or raises one clear flag with the exact record that broke. We stopped spot checking everything and only look at what gets flagged. Trust came back once the automation was honest about what it skipped.