r/automation

I understand what I am about to say is not going to be popular with some. And the reason I am writing this is because I see so many people trying to get into or struggling in it.

First, for validation. I am 26 year vet in proving tech solutions to fortune 1000 companies across multiple industries. I wanted to caveat that so its understood this is not an opinion piece. Its hard documented fact and well know.

Automation is dead and super over saturated. Automation is a super small part of AI capacity and most clients see little to no value at the end of the day.

Claude code crushed automation tools. Anyone now can build automation with simple conversation. That is why people are moving out of apps like N8N.

The real power is AI agents and Looping so if you want any success, this is a must.

But the most important piece is not if you can automate anything. Its your ability to think of solutions and understand business processes. Not automation. If you can develop this mentality and master seeing problems and using AI tools to solution, then your value will sky rocket.

THIS IS A MUST. I can tell most of you are seeing these influencers talk about making 10k a month in automation. Its simple super rare and the odds a stacked against you. I know very experienced people in this field who are putting automation behind them.

It has its place don't get me wrong. And if you have strong knowledge of AI agents and looping with automation you become more valuable.

Moral of the story folks is your ability to first understand business and their process as good as they do, and identifying ways AI tools can provide help solutions is what is going to make you successful.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions I am happy to respond.

Been building automation for SMBs for ~8 years (started in Google Ads, moved into Make/n8n pipelines, now full AI agents). Wanted to share something I didn't expect when I launched my own product.

I run a platform that lets businesses deploy an AI support agent across WA, IG, email, phone, Messenger, SMS one unified inbox, one agent, deterministic flows so it doesn't hallucinate refund policies.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about selling automation to SMBs: they don't buy tools, they buy outcomes. A restaurant owner doesn't want a "graph-based flow builder." They want to stop losing bookings at 9pm when nobody answers the phone.

Some observations from the last year that might be useful whether you use my platform or not:

1. The implementation gap is the real business. Every SMB automation tool has the same problem: the software is $50-200/month, but the setup, prompt design, flow logic, and channel connections are worth $1,500-5,000 as a service. SaaS founders (me included) can't service that. Local agencies and freelancers can. That gap is where the money is.

2. Recurring beats one-off, every time. The agencies doing best aren't charging setup fees they're charging $300-800/month "AI receptionist management" retainers. Client churn is near zero because ripping out a working support agent is painful.

3. Vertical > horizontal. The partners crushing it picked one niche (dental clinics, real estate agencies, franchises, restaurants) and built one templated agent they redeploy over and over. Setup time drops from 20 hours to 3.

4. Multichannel is the moat. Anyone can build a website chatbot in an afternoon. Almost nobody can offer "one agent that answers WA, IG DMs, email AND the phone." That's what closes deals SMBs live on WA and their phone line, not on webchat.

5. The economics only work because they don't own the infrastructure. Platform cost per agent is a rounding error next to what they charge. They set their own setup fees and monthly retainers, keep the client relationship, run it under their own brand and the platform maintenance, uptime, and channel integrations aren't their problem.
It's the classic "sell the outcome, rent the machine" model.

The irony isn't lost on me: I spent two years building the tech, and the people making the cleanest money are the ones who spent two weeks learning it and then went out and sold it.

Happy to answer questions about what verticals convert best, how they price retainers, or the tech stack the retainer pricing question comes up a lot.

Been running a small automation shop in Mumbai for a few months now. n8n + make + whatsapp mostly. The building part is honestly the easy part at this point. What I keep getting stuck on is pricing and the after part.

Like I quote a lead routing + whatsapp follow up build and the client compares it to just hiring a guy for 15k a month and I don't have a clean answer for why the automation costs more when to them it looks like a one time thing.

And then after delivery — inputs drift, someone changes a form field, an api changes and suddenly you're doing free maintenance forever or having the awkward retainer conversation.

So genuinely asking people who've been doing this longer:

• do you charge one time or push retainer from day one
• what do you do when the client ghosts once the build works
• anyone doing outcome based pricing or is that a trap

Not looking for a course lol. Just actual numbers and war stories if you're open to sharing.

spent months building this and the beta just opened, so i want honest feedback. especially the "this wont work because" kind.

you publish an n8n-compatible agent, set a per run price, and people pay each time it runs. you keep 100% of your price, the only cut is 10% when you cash out. the part i think actually matters: the AI cost is billed to the caller, not you. token cost stops eating your margin, you can even mark it up.

most of us sell the template once for 29 bucks and thats it. this is the other option: get paid every run.

its rough, its a beta, i want builders who break things. link in my profile if you want to poke at it. im the founder, ask me anything.

Our automation team has built a decent backlog over the last year, but prioritization is becoming harder than implementation. Some opportunities look obvious until someone digs in and discovers 15 exceptions, multiple approval paths, manual workarounds, and dependencies nobody documented. Other workflows seem complicated on the surface but end up being surprisingly straightforward once you map them out. Right now we're mostly using spreadsheets, workshops, and process maps to decide what gets automated next, but it feels increasingly subjective. The loudest stakeholder often wins. We've had a few cases where something looked like a great automation candidate, only to discover halfway through that the real process was very different from what was documented. I'm curious how other teams are handling this. Are you using dedicated process discovery or automation planning tools before committing engineering or RPA resources, or is everyone still relying on spreadsheets and interviews?

The flow is:

1. Say 20 people pool money for a shared monthly subscription service. A residential area with 20 houses hires security guard services for their area. All 20 houses share the cost and all of them have to pay their portion for the month's service by the end of the every month.

2. The money will be banked into a certain bank account. Payments wise, the payers upload a pdf or image screenshot of their bank-in slips as proof of payment.

3. I have to download the pdfs and screenshots into a folder for archiving documentation.

4. There are 5 chatgroups to manage. So, that's 100 bank-ins and 100 files to download per month in theory. I wish to automate the process of downloading all of Group A's payment slips into a Group A folder, and Group B's payment slips into a Group B folder, and so on. And ideally, naming the pdf files according to the phone number which uploaded the file.

Is there such a bot which does that?

The mass chatgroup uploads is intended as a way to deal with free riders. Like after the payments are gathered and sorted at month end, the free riders get named and shamed in the chatgroup as "Mr. So-and-so from house So-and-so did not pay his monthly fee". That sort of thing.

This is probably the 100th time someone has made this type of post, but anyways.
Hi, I just graduated high school recently and am currently working minimum wage, and god, i hate working (for someone else). Genuinely nothing motivates me more to search for great wealth more than my employment.

i’ve been trying to discover different skills that could possibly become something i work on continuously, and eventually scale. Automation caught my eye.

I’ve been learning Make and have a somewhat intermediate understanding of it all. I’ve made a couple projects, like lead follow ups after 2 days, confirmation emails, and basic stuff like that.

I just wanna know, am i on the right path? how do i transition from this to actually reaching out to businesses and pitching my ability to improve their businesses? what should i learn more about and improve on?

Is this even WORTH my time? if so, what steps should i take to ensure i’m actually useful?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, Thanks!

My clients send project requirements as dozens of loose WhatsApp messages - corrections, screenshots, voice notes, scope changes buried mid-thread. I wanted an automated pipeline: chat goes in, structured task board comes out. Sharing the setup since it took some trial and error.

The main gotcha: the WhatsApp Business API and Twilio are built for sending messages from a business number, not for reading your existing personal chats - and connecting your chats to a third-party cloud CRM means client conversations sit on someone else's servers, which I wasn't willing to do. The workable approach is a browser extension that reads WhatsApp Web locally and calls an LLM with your own API key, so messages go from your browser straight to OpenAI/Anthropic and nowhere else.

Here's the setup:

1. Get an API key from Anthropic or OpenAI (a few dollars of credit is plenty - each extraction is one call over the selected messages)
2. Install WA Kanban AI from the Chrome Web Store and paste the key on its options page
3. Open the client chat in WhatsApp Web, navigate to the extension, and choose how far back to read (e.g., "last 3 days" for a fresh requirements dump, or further back for a full project)
4. It generates task cards - title, description, the original source message, attachments, and step-by-step implementation instructions - onto a local Kanban board (Backlog / To Do / In Progress / Review / Done)
5. Drag cards as work progresses; the board keeps a full move history, which doubles as a paper trail when a client says "I never asked for that"
6. You can generate a brandable link with a client for them to see the progress. Thats only time when the data goes to external cloud and only the generated kanban board, not Whatsapp messages. Client can't update the board, only view.

Refinement tips from a few weeks of use:

• Re-running on the same chat after new messages arrive is how you catch mid-thread scope changes - the "forget what I said about the logo" messages get folded into the tasks instead of lost.
• Each card copies out as clean text, so the implementation-steps section pastes directly into Claude or Cursor as a prompt. Chat message → task card → coding agent with zero manual rewriting is the actual win here.
• You can add manual tasks alongside the generated ones, so the board becomes the single source of truth rather than one more parallel system.

For getting tasks out to other systems (Trello, a database, Linear), there's no native integration - I copy the card text and let an automation handle it, or paste into an agent. If someone has a cleaner bridge for that step, I'm interested.

Costs: the extension's free tier covers the core flow; Pro is a one-time payment (no subscription) and adds a live board link you can share with the client so they see task status without installing anything. LLM usage is whatever your own API key burns, which for chat-sized inputs is cents.

Over the last few months I built a few automations to remove the manual grind from my trading day. Sharing my morning routine in case it's useful, and I'd love to steal ideas from yours.

Before market open, my system auto-pulls:

• Overnight moves + gap scanners on my watchlist
• Key economic events for the day
• Yesterday's open positions + P&L carryforward
• Pre-set alerts on my key levels

On execution it logs entry/exit, size, and R automatically. At EOD it generates a one-page report — trades, P&L, mistakes tagged.

Two questions for the room:

1. What do you check every morning before the first trade that I might be missing?
2. What part of your day do you wish was automated but isn't?

EOD Report 02/07/2026 | Levels for 03/07/2026PCR 1.32 | VIX 12.29 (-7.21%)FII -311.82 Cr | DII +1,784.40 Cr

https://preview.redd.it/cro5ghipc7bh1.png?width=2168&format=png&auto=webp&s=53815928110e4115a7c73da766552d41fb710bb7

Daily summary

Hi everyone. I'm building an AI Contract & ToR Triage Agent for my team to automatically extract SLAs, risks, and technical requirements from public bidding documents (30+ pages, messy tables).

I originally planned an architecture using an Azure VM with Python and Docker for the heavy lifting (OCR, text cleaning, chunking). However, since I sit in a business team outside of the IT department, my request for the VM was denied due to strict security policies and budget constraints. Every new piece of infrastructure is seen as an unnecessary cost.

Can this be done entirely within n8n? The pipeline I need: Ingest PDF -> OCR -> Clean & Chunk text -> Embed -> Query LLM

- How do you handle OCR and chunking of 30+ page PDFs purely within n8n? Are there reliable community nodes or cheap/serverless APIs you recommend calling from n8n to offload this?

- Without a dedicated Docker host for something like Qdrant, what is the most cost-effective Vector DB approach that integrates smoothly with n8n's AI nodes?

Any advice on pushing n8n to its absolute limits for Document Intelligence would be amazing!

The automation landscape is incredibly fragmented right now. Some engineers swear by open-source, custom-coded Python frameworks utilizing tools like Celery or Airflow, while others prefer the speed and visual interface of low-code/no-code integration platforms like Make, n8n, or Zapier.

Personally, I’ve found that while low-code platforms speed up our prototyping by almost 50%, the long-term subscription costs and execution limits drive us back to custom code for heavy enterprise workloads.

I want to know about the community's favorite tools.

If you had to strip away your entire stack and keep just one core framework or platform to handle all your automated workflows and AI integrations, what would it be and why?

I recently used ChatGPT Projects during my son’s hospitalization—not for medical advice, but to stay organized.

I kept all reports, prescriptions, insurance documents, medication timelines, and doctor notes inside one Project.

Since everything stayed in context, I didn’t have to repeatedly explain the situation, and it helped me prepare better questions for doctors and keep family updated.

It genuinely reduced the mental overhead during a stressful time.

Has anyone else used AI as an organizational tool during a hospital stay or other major life event? I’d love to hear how you approached it.

Looking at the latest trajectory of autonomous agents and advanced code interpreters, it's clear that the barrier to entry for building complex software pipelines is dropping fast.

Tasks that used to require a dedicated middleware developer can now be scaffolded by an AI system in a fraction of the time. Based on your current industry observations, which technical roles or routine tasks do you think will be completely handled by automated systems within the next 24 months?

More importantly, how are you personally shifting your own skill set to stay ahead of the curve?

Are you focusing more on system architecture, prompt engineering, data governance, or something else entirely?

Let’s discuss how we can stay valuable as the tech evolves.

Hi everyone,

I build GTM and automation systems, mostly for b2b SaaS, been doing it a few years so I’m fairly technical. Outbound engines, inbound lead response, lead routing, CRM cleanup, that kind of thing.

Not selling anything here, just find other people’s pipelines genuinely fun to solve, and I’m trying to see more real problems.

So drop the thing that’s currently broken or manual in your funnel. Leads coming in and dying before anyone replies. Outbound that’s all copy-paste. A CRM nobody trusts. Data you’re moving by hand between five tools. Whatever it is.

Comment below and I’ll fix it