I'd be curious to learn why. I've seen the pain of companies tricked into thinking robotic process automation to do their horrendous excel workflows is a good idea. I've seen the benefit of a decent python data engineer with a small AWS budget.

The techier folks definitely have a different set of problems but the speed at which hings get done is night and day. Companies with old school work patterns (which, in my personal experience, means dusty old banks) are terminally entrenched in their ways.

I think you’re both right.

Taking some hopelessly byzantine, spreadsheet-driven process and “automating” it by building a Rube Goldberg scripting framework around it is the kind of totally stupid automation that doesn’t work.

Actually getting down to surface level and understanding fundamentally what each of those humans is accomplishing via those spreadsheets, extracting that all the way back out to a domain model and process flow diagram, and then selectively replacing process steps, whole cloth, with tech designed to be an actual subservice with SLA targets, is the right way to do it.

Throwing the spreadsheets and/or humans out altogether and starting “from scratch” is so exceedingly and needlessly risky from an information loss and hubris point that, well, good luck, but you’re nearly certain to fail.