Should You Automate Your Online Business?

Isis Franca on Unsplash

The age of automation marches on with fresh fuel from AI tools, inflation cost-cutting, and what seems to be a genuine and growing desire to spend less time working and more time living.

But just because something can be automated doesn't mean it should be. Automation is a tool, and at its core the entire point of automation is to replace labor. I'm not someone who thinks we should do this without thought: often, automation proponents believe replacing all labor is the same. Get rid of it. Why bother paying for people when an app can do it for a fraction of the cost?¹

But some actions, I believe, should not be replaced. They are human work, and they need a human to do them.²

Automation stems from the desire to do more. We can't escape that. The first time we really see automation as a concept is as part of the Industrial Revolution, where time-saving emerged as a capitalistic device to create more monetary value by speeding up production and reducing human labor costs.³ When we situate automation within this historical context, it becomes reasonable to interrogate our own desires to automate. Why are we told that this is the thing that you must do to grow your business? Who benefits when automation is the default? Who is hurt? And what do we gain or lose through automation?

In Which I Am A Hypocritical Fool

Many years ago, a small business owner on Instagram had an account that I noticed was growing very quickly. She had good photos and solid copy, but the speed of growth was wild for the field of work she was in. Within months she had tripled what it had taken me years to do, and I booked a consult with her since her other job was as a social media manager. I wanted to know the secret!

And the secret was…automation. She ran a complex bot software that followed, unfollowed, engaged, and even watched Instagram stories on her behalf. She backed it up with real, valuable content. But she had skipped to the front of the line by automating the human actions of Instagram, leaving everyone to think that she had earned her rarified status through hard work, deep interaction, and seemingly endless scrolling time.

(Reader, I must confess that I hired her to do the same for me, and my account got restricted within days. That's what I get for doing something that grossed me out because I thought it was necessary to compete.)