When you let accountants and their ilk manage automation, you end up with the situation you describe. Such idiots see the "opportunity" to reduce costs by eliminating workers from employment, and by reducing the necessary skill level (and thus compensation level) of workers. If they had half a brain between them, these gits would realize that they should redirect intelligence to work on other enhancements to the process.

The real value in automation is not in reducing the amount of involvement of humans in the process; it's increasing the opportunity for humans to work on improving things that makes automation valuable. This is why good programmers who automate software testing then spend the extra time they don't have to spend testing software on doing other productive things, such as refactoring code to make the application more stable, secure, and maintainable.