>> This time out it feels more like "we can do existing [thing], but reduce the cost of doing it by not employing people"

I was doing RPA (robotic process automation) 8 years ago. Nobody wanted it in their departments. Whenever we would do presentations, we were told to never, ever, ever talk about this technology replacing people - it only removes the mundane work so teams can focus more on the bigger scope stuff. In the end, we did dozens and dozens of presentations and only two teams asked us to do some automation work for them.

The other leaders had no desire to use this technology because they were not only fearful of it replacing people on their teams, they were fearful it would impact their budgets negatively so they just quietly turned us down.

Unfortunately, you're right because as soon as this stuff gets automated and you find out 1/3rd of your team is doing those mundane tasks, you learn very quickly you can indeed remove those people since there won't be enough "big" initiatives to keep everybody busy enough.

The caveat was even on some of the biggest automations we did, you still needed a subset of people on the team you were working with to make sure the automations were running correctly and not breaking down. And when they did crash, since a lot of these were moving time sensitive data, it was like someone just stole the crown jewels and suddenly you need two war rooms and now you're ordering in for lunch.