Automation and AI aren’t synonymous, but there is a relationship. As AI capabilities have improved, more companies are using it to automate parts of the business that previously were human-touch only. Deciding what to automate and how to use technology for the greatest impact, is something our Fast Company Impact Council members think about daily. Here’s what 24 members said about how they incorporate automation, and how that has changed over time.
1. SCALE CONSISTENCY AND FAIRNESS
Automation and AI are most valuable when they reclaim time for high-impact, human-centered work. In mission-driven organizations like ours, core functions—relationship-building, equity-centered design, and complex judgment—cannot be automated. Instead, we apply AI to scale consistency and fairness. For example, funders spend an average of four minutes reviewing a grant application. We built an AI-powered review tool to standardize evaluations and reduce bias, while keeping humans accountable for final decisions. Effectiveness, then efficiency. — Hala Hanna, MIT Solve
2. REPORTING TOOL TURNED INTO A PRODUCT
Automation plays a large and growing role in our operations. We were not always thinking this way. After AI emerged, we took a hard look at our biggest pain points, especially reporting, which took around 25% of our time. We built internal tools to streamline and improve it. Now we can quickly surface the insights that clients care about, improve the relation to ROI, and free up the team to focus on strategic and creative work. That system has evolved into a product we now offer other teams. — Kalie Moore, High Vibe PR
3. AVOID ENGINEERING SPRINT
Two years ago, automation in our studio meant faster handoffs. Today, our designers build working front-end prototypes in an afternoon using Claude Code, no engineering sprint required. That same shift is happening across every creative discipline we touch. The only standard we hold: Can the output meet the same bar of craft as something made by hand? When it can, wedwinadopt immediately. The tools are moving fast enough that the answer changes month to month. — Peter Smart, Fantasy
4. AI CREATION OF MANUALS AND PROCEDURES
Automation and AI are so closely related that the question really is “How has AI impacted your operations?” The answer is: huge! Whether it’s manuals for processes or standard operation procedures, all can be created or adapted within minutes. These are tasks that previously took days or weeks. Strategic judgment is still human and that is where the focus of senior management has to be. — Larraine Segil, Exceptional Women Alliance Foundation
5. ALIGN AUTOMATION TO OPERATIONAL GOALS
Automation plays a bigger role every year, evolving from task efficiency to decision support that helps teams operate with more precision. We’ve embedded it across the business, from call routing and document processing to predictive analytics for labor planning, dock operations, and city routing. The key is aligning automation to operational goals, refining it continuously, and keeping the teams closest to it involved, so trust builds and adoption follows. — Dennis Anderson, ArcBest
6. FREE UP TIME FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE
Automation is becoming an exciting new opportunity every day on the operations side. It frees up time for us to focus on the customer service component, which we have no intention of automating. Nobody ever won a customer over with a chat bot. — Adam Thatcher, Grace Farms
7. AMPLIFY HUMAN CAPACITY
We seek to automate processes and work that amplify the human capacity that is core to our business. We want our sales people to be spending time in front of customers, so we automate time-consuming tasks. We want our support people focused on really gnarly customer issues, so we automate the ability for customers to get answers to the simple problems. Automation should amplify the core of roles and the capacity of humans. — Scott Brighton, Bonterra
8. CREATE SPACE FOR HUMAN JUDGMENT
Automation plays a much larger role now than it did even a few years ago, particularly in reducing repetitive work and creating more space for thinking that requires judgment. What has changed for me is that I think less about automation purely as efficiency and more about whether it improves how people experience a process. If something becomes faster but less clear, that is not necessarily progress. The best use of automation is when it removes friction and creates room for work that still depends on human judgment and connection. — Chadwin Sandifer, EdD, Fairleigh Dickinson University
9. IT’S NOW A DISCIPLINE TOOL
Automation is becoming a discipline tool, not just an efficiency tool. Earlier, the focus was saving time. Now the bigger value is consistency, visibility, and scale. In impact-driven work, automation helps reduce manual drag so teams can spend more time on strategy, stakeholder alignment, and outcomes. The goal is not to remove judgment. It is to protect time for better judgment. — Rukiya Kelly, FICO
10. AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
We have seen a significant ramp-up in the way the company is being run, primarily by using AI to automate as much as possible. The cost of software has dropped dramatically overnight, so why not automate like never before? — Neil Cawse, Geotab
11. IMPROVE OPPORTUNITIES FOR LEARNING
Education is grounded in curiosity and reflection, so there is a balance between the efficiencies created through automation and the human interaction required for learning. Identifying systems and points of friction that inhibit or reduce opportunities for learning and connection allows us to focus on students as learners. There is a danger in higher education of focusing too much on optimization and automation. We need to leave room for students to be curious, reflect, and engage as part of their learning process. — Garret Westlake, Virginia Commonwealth University
12. SHOULD YOU AUTOMATE?
As a creative consultancy, automation sits slightly at odds with what we do; it’s almost the antithesis of the work itself. That said, like any business, there’s a layer of necessary background activity, and that’s where automation has real value. Over time, the question has shifted. It’s no longer can we automate, but should we. Knowing what to automate—and, crucially, what not to—is where the judgment lies. — James Greenfield, Koto
13. ONGOING MAINTENANCE
Automation has moved from saving time to shaping how work actually gets done. Early on, it was about reducing manual tasks; now the challenge is ongoing maintenance—keeping systems useful, up-to-date, and actually used, rather than creating more abandoned tools. In government especially, success comes from embedding automation into real workflows so it improves coordination and follow-through over time, not just launching something new. — Madeleine Smith, Civic Roundtable
14. RETHINK ENTIRE WORKFLOWS
Automation plays a much larger role in operations now than it did even a few years ago because the approach has shifted from automating specific tasks to rethinking entire workflows. The biggest change is that people are spending less time on manual steps and more time on strategic thinking, problem solving, and making decisions that require human judgment. Automation has become less about speed alone and more about reshaping how work happens across teams and functions. — Justina Nixon-Saintil, IBM
15. AUTOMATE PARTS OF DIGITAL PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
Mundane, repeating tasks in our software deployment pipelines have long been automated. Deploying product updates with a single command is a requirement for some projects. AI is making it practical to automate parts of the digital product design and development process that were difficult or impossible to automate previously, including creating project plans, crafting design prototypes, and performing code reviews. — Brad Weber, InspiringApps
16. MINIMIZE OVERHEAD
Automation helps me scale my company without building a lot of overhead too early. It speeds up research, synthesis, drafting, and preparation, which gives me more leverage and frees me up to focus on judgment, client relationships, and what actually matters in the business. — Todd James, Aurora Insights
17. LAYER IN PERSONALIZATION
For us, automation is most valuable when it creates organization-wide efficiency, ensuring every team is working from the same, most up-to-date source of truth. Just as importantly, it allows us to layer in personalization—so people can get the specific insights they need, when they need them. One example is our company data bot that allows anyone to ask questions about product or content performance and get real-time, tailored answers. That’s automation at its best: reducing friction, enabling data-driven decision-making, and helping cross-functional teams move faster and more confidently. — Nathan Friedman, Understood.org
18. DESIGN DECISION AND COORDINATION LAYER
Automation is playing a larger role in our operations, but not as a substitute for judgment. Its best use is in the decision and coordination layer around design: routing information, tracking actions, surfacing inconsistencies, reducing administrative drag, and closing loops faster. Over time, our view has shifted from speeding up isolated tasks to making delivery more reliable, measurable, and consistent, so our professionals can spend more time on tradeoffs, creativity, and client decisions. — Mike Sewell, Gresham Smith
19. A COORDINATED, REPEATABLE PROCESS
Automation is fundamental to us—it’s how our model works. In addition to accelerating tasks through automation, we’re increasing system-wide capacity by turning a manual, resource-constrained process into a coordinated, repeatable one. That means the same workforce can deliver more, with better safety and consistency. It’s a productivity unlock for the entire grid buildout, not just a tool on the margin. — Cameron Van Der Berg, Infravision
20. AUGMENT THINKING AND TEAM EMPOWERMENT
We’ve moved from automating tasks and supporting individuals to augmenting thinking and empowering teams. AI now touches everything we do from content and creative to operational. Teams that used to spend days on a deliverable are producing first versions in hours and going deeper on quality. What hasn’t changed is human judgment at the critical junctions; the decisions that shape how young children learn stay firmly with our educators and researchers. — Alex Galvagni, Age of Learning
21. RESEARCH, DRAFTING, AND ADAPTING TO REAL-WORLD SIGNALS
Since AI is at the core of our own platform, automation has become a bigger part of how we operate and build today. Internally, it helps with things like research and drafting. But more broadly, it’s part of a shift toward systems that actually learn and adapt to real-world signals. It’s gone from a nice-to-have, to something teams just expect to be there…and something that helps drive results. — Kevin Laymoun, Constructor
22. ENHANCE SAFETY AND QUALITY STANDARDS
Automation is a critical part of how we commercially scale our operations. It prioritizes consistent capabilities that customers and partners expect. Incorporating this foundational tool into our organization, we have been able to enhance safety and quality standards, generate valuable operational data, and allow for process optimization across facilities. It advances competitive differentiators, increases reliability, furthers our growth, and is, and will continue to be, an important driver of creating a circular economy. — David Klanecky, Cirba Solutions
23. ANYTHING THAT MUST BE DONE THE SAME WAY REPEATEDLY
Automation is core to everything we do. A core belief is anything that has to be done the same way each time is an opportunity to for automation. As automations become more accessible, it is first question I ask when we are building or scaling—how do we make this clickless? — Effie Carlson, Watershed Health
24. FOCUS, NOT EFFICIENCY
Automation is no longer just about efficiency, it’s about focus. We aggressively offload repetitive work so our team can spend time on judgment, creativity, and relationships. The goal isn’t fewer people; it’s higher-leverage work per person. — Logan Mulvey, GoDigital Music
