The Rise of the Automation Engineer

There is a lot of talk about the jobs AI takes away and very little about the ones it creates. While pessimism might be easier (and certainly gets more clicks), I’m more optimistic. From where I sit, I’m seeing AI kill soul-sucking, tedious work and letting us focus on work that matters. The person who wields it has a true AI-native job: the Automation Engineer.

Here’s my take:

1: There's unlimited demand for work, which means there's unlimited demand for automation.

2: It's easier than ever to build the automation itself.

3: It's still hard to know what to automate, and how to embed it inside a company that has real people, real politics, and real processes.

4: Thus it takes a talented person who has put in the hours and can sit with a team, actually understand what they need, then use the latest tools to build it for them.

That person is the Automation Engineer.

Every generation of technology creates jobs that didn't exist before it, jobs that arise from an immediate need in an emergent industry. The Automation Engineer is a key example of those jobs for this generation. Nobody has ten years of experience doing this yet, because ten years ago the tools that made it possible didn't exist (it didn’t even exist two years ago).

This position is about thinking beyond a ticket-to-ticket basis. It’s about seeing the whole system, seeing how an access request touches HR, Legal, and IT all at once, where the next automation needs to sit before anyone's even asked for it. That's a skill you only get from being embedded in the complexity of a corporation and figuring out where everything connects.

Automation Engineers apply this to the enterprise. There’s been a lot of fear mongering in the media about AI taking jobs. And the truth is, some of the ticket work this replaces does go away. But the person doing that work doesn't have to go away with it. SeatGeek is a perfect example of this.

Their IT team got buried the week they rolled out ChatGPT Enterprise. 11x the average volume requests on day one, the whole company filing tickets by day three. Each ticket was entered field by field with a manager's approval on every single one, no matter the risk. We started working with them in January. 40% of IT requests were resolved automatically within three weeks. Above 50% within sixty days.

The team who typically responded to the now-automated IT requests didn't get managed out. They got redeployed into Customer Support, Tech Compliance, and Legal, to build automations into parts of the business that never had an engineer sitting inside them before. SeatGeek's own support leadership liked that outcome enough to fund five more of those roles. SeatGeek saw the power of automation engineers early.

[quote card] "Our IT folks will no longer be focused on tickets closed or CSAT or TTR. They'll be focused on revenue generation, days saved during accounting close, and dollars saved on SaaS elimination instead." — Elisa Folden, Senior Manager, Business Technology, SeatGeek

And it's not just SeatGeek. We're seeing Fortune 20 companies already building this function themselves, with their own AI Automation Engineer on staff before we ever published a job description.

Automation as a service isn't software you buy and configure yourself. It's a person, embedded, who makes it actually happen inside your company.

Anyone can build an automation now. But seeing, understanding, and engineering an automation system inside a real company, with real people and real politics and a hundred decisions nobody wrote down? That still takes someone who's put in the hours. That's who we're hiring for.

If you want to be one of the first hundred, my inbox is open.

And if you need help redirecting your best people now that they're not fighting tickets all day, let's talk about the opportunity ahead.