Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate

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1. 01

   RPA automates the existing steps of a process; an agent can rewrite the process; you choose by how structured and how reversible each step is.

   Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate · 1990

   RPA for stable, auditable steps; an agent for exceptions and judgement; neither for a process that should have been abolished.

   RPA: deterministic, cheap (around $0.001 per task), auditable, brittle to interface changes, no judgement. Agents: probabilistic, $0.01–0.10 per decision (vendor figures, 2026), handle unstructured input and exceptions, need evaluations and guardrails. The decision: high volume, stable structure, strict audit — RPA; unstructured inputs, exceptions, judgement — an agent; both — the hybrid stack (lesson 23). Hammer's warning applies to both: automating a bad process ("paving the cow paths") is the most common failure, and agents make the paving faster. First ask what the process should look like; only then decide what to automate.

   “It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over.”

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