Will this replace my team?

This one rarely gets asked directly by the person paying. It gets asked in the corridor afterwards, by the person who has to use it.

I would rather have it out in the open on day one, because a team that quietly believes the answer is yes will not adopt what you build, however good it is.

My honest answer

In everything I have delivered, the work that disappeared was work nobody wanted. Re-typing an order that already existed in an email. Building the same report every Friday. Ringing round to find out where a part is.

Nobody has ever come to me and said: the best part of my job is copying between two systems. That work vanishing is not a threat, it is a Tuesday afternoon returned to you.

What I will not pretend

I am not going to tell you no job anywhere ever changes. If a role is entirely made of the work we are automating, that is a real conversation and it belongs to you, not to me, and it should happen before the build, not after.

What I have seen far more often is a business that could not hire fast enough, or could not take on the extra work, and now can.

The question that reframes it

Somebody asked one of my clients: what would you do with the five hours if you had it? The team had an answer immediately, and it was not "sit down". It was the work they had been meaning to get to for two years.

Ask your team that question before you buy anything. Their answer tells you whether you have an automation project or a redundancy conversation, and you should know which one you are running.