Useful Automation Requires 1 Skill Most Teams Overlook. It Isn’t Coding or Engineering

Before you can automate your work, you have to understand it. Most companies skip that step.

EXPERT OPINION BY AMY ZWAGERMAN, BRAND AND AI STRATEGIST

I built an 88-step automation earlier this year. It required three web scrapers and a Zapier workflow that took me a couple of weeks to design. I was genuinely proud of the work, but it broke the first time it received an input I hadn’t anticipated. 

The surprising thing about this story isn’t that the automation broke. It was bound to fail at some point. It’s that I couldn’t fix the issue without tearing it apart. The problem was sitting inside the architecture, not the functionality. The entire thing needed to be rebuilt around a simpler logic with fewer dependencies and fewer places to fail. The tool itself worked fine. My understanding of my own process was the problem.

That experience clarified something for me the AI

That experience clarified something for me the AI conversation hadn’t explained clearly enough yet: the skill you need to learn if you want to use AI well is operations. The ability to map how your work actually happens. It’s a skill IT professionals, coders, and engineers have always used in their work, but applying it within a marketing, sales, or client context is new.

Most of us have never had to explain how we do things because we just do them. 

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When we execute work manually, we carry ambiguity. We make micro-decisions in real time without noticing them. We skip steps, double back, and make judgment calls that never get documented. It all works because a human brain is flexible enough to absorb the mess.

A machine, however, is not. The moment you try to automate or augment a human workflow with AI, every undocumented decision, implicit step, and “I’ll know it when I see it” judgment becomes a failure point. 

That’s the gap between the pitch and reality

That’s the gap between the pitch and reality. The pitch says AI makes your work faster. The reality is AI requires you to restructure how you work. Speed comes much later, after you’ve done the groundwork of understanding what you’re actually trying to systematize.

I went backwards. It’s a natural mistake. When the tools promise speed, slowing down to examine how you actually work feels like the wrong move.

Source: www.inc.com