B31 Reflections - Automate the Task, Not the Person

A reflection from BRAIN Chief Research Office Dr Rob Layton following our recent B31 workshop:

Our recent B31 workshop reinforced something I think is important for any business exploring AI: focus on automating tasks, not jobs.

We discussed the practical realities of bringing AI into a business, governance, risk, trust, and how employees and subcontractors feel about working with AI rather than people. One thing remains clear: people still value working with people.

Adrian Holtham from Plainlight demonstrated how businesses can take an existing workflow, break it into its individual parts, and identify where automation might genuinely help. Using Make.com, he then showed us what an AI-enabled workflow looks like in practice.

That practical demonstration highlighted where I think the real opportunity lies.

Businesses already have skilled people with valuable experience and domain knowledge. If AI can remove repetitive tasks from their workload, those people have more time for interesting, valuable and impactful work.

But automation isn’t something you can simply switch on and forget. AI can make subtle mistakes, and those mistakes can become significant when they’re embedded inside an automated process. Human oversight and good governance remain essential.

My takeaway from the session was simple: find the tasks worth automating, free your people to do what they do best, and keep a human eye on what the AI is doing.

That feels like a much healthier path to AI adoption.

Exploring what AI could mean for your organisation?

BRAIN is vendor and technology agnostic. Our role is to help regional organisations navigate AI through independent research, responsible stewardship and informed adoption, not to sell or implement technology.

Learn more, participate in our work, or join the network at brain.net.au.