Automating a task and understanding it are not the same skill, and skipping straight to the first one usually backfires.
I've watched people automate a report before ever manually building it once and the automation just encodes whatever mistake was already baked into the process. The manual version is where you find the edge cases. The automated version is where you scale them.
Do it by hand once before you let a script do it forever.
Not where the dashboard says it stalls. Where people wait, re-enter information, hunt for context, or chase an approval.
That answer usually matters more than a long software wish list.
My first step on an automation project is to map the real handoffs. The goal is not to automate everything. It is to remove avoidable work without creating a new mess.
If you can describe the process in five sentences, I can usually spot the first useful improvement.