Automation multiplies whatever process you point it at — including the broken ones. Before you wire anything together, three questions save most of the regret.
Is the process worth keeping?
Automate only what you'd be happy to do more of. If a workflow is slow because it's badly designed, automation just lets you do the wrong thing faster and at scale. The cheapest optimisation is often deletion — remove the step before you speed it up.
Who owns it when it breaks?
Every automation is a small piece of infrastructure, and infrastructure fails silently. If no one owns the flow, the first sign of trouble will be a customer, not a dashboard. Name the owner before you ship, or don't ship.
What does it actually free up?
Automation is worth it when it returns something you can point at: hours back, errors down, a decision made sooner. "It feels more modern" is not a return. If you can't name what the saved time gets spent on, you haven't finished the case for doing it.
Get these three right and the tooling is almost an afterthought. Get them wrong and the most sophisticated automation in the world just industrialises a bad habit.