This! The point of automation is rarely saving time. The point of automation is increasing quality.

It can be a data quality, it can be mitigating a production risk, can be avoiding regression.

Heck even unit tests are automation (you may just manually test your code once and call the day).

I am not saying that automation is always good, but the evaluation should be

1. what is the cost of production/data quality/regression gone wild? (Possibly in€/$/¥)
2. what is the cost of the person/team performing the task over 1 Year (Again, £€$¥)
3. what is the expected cost of the person/team implementing automation?

Then you do (3)*3 - (1) *3 - (2). Is it positive? You do, is it negative you? You don’t. The more it’s positive the higher the priority of doing.

Why the *3? The first because the expected cost of automation is always massively underestimated The second because it takes multiple times something goes wrong till the decision is reconsidered 🙂

Why 1 year? Because generally the task to automatize changes or disappear