4. The Brittleness Problem

Every automation is built on assumptions. "The email always has the invoice as an attachment." "The customer always fills out every field in the form." "The data will always be in this format."

It won't be.

Customers skip fields. Invoices come as PDFs, Word docs, or images. APIs change. Your vendor updates their data format. Someone copy-pastes data weirdly.

When assumptions break, automation breaks too. And because it's automatic, it might break silently. You might not notice for a week that nothing's been logged.

Where to draw the line: Automation is great for predictable workflows. But it needs monitoring and exception handling. You need to know: - When did this last run? - Did it succeed? - What failed? - What needs manual attention?

If you build an automation and never check it again, you're building a time bomb.

The safe approach: Automations that have human checkpoints built in. A daily digest of what ran. A flag for unusual data. A way to manually review before the final step. Automation with oversight.