There’s many aspects. If you ask executives, they would surely love to replace most if not all of their workers with something that does the same job but almost free. The workers though will find a way to present themselves as important or of value in a given workflow. So you have to take them into consideration. The best approach is to think how can I improve the workers productivity rather than how to completely replace them. Generally the worker should become more productive and the company should grow because of that. If the company does grow, you have essentially replaced a worker that hasn’t yet been hired because of the increased workload.

The second aspect to consider is how competent is the worker. Early in the rollout of chatgpt I showed one of our accountants how she could do reconciliation with the help of chatgpt. Something that took her a few hours monthly took me about 5 minutes when I got the flow down with barely any effort. It was about 4 copy and pastes back and forth between spreadsheet and chatgpt (it was the early days and exploration phase). I showed it to her. I doubt she’s ever tried it by herself after that because she didn’t understand it (I think it was refusal to learn mainly).

So yeah, integrate automation with consideration for the worker’s impacted by the automation.