The hardest part of automation is not the tooling. It is choosing the right first workflow — something repetitive enough to matter, simple enough to succeed, and visible enough that people notice when it works.
Map the current process step by step before touching any tool. Who triggers it, what data flows in, what decisions get made, what data flows out, and where it ends up. If you cannot draw it on one page, it is not ready to automate yet.
Pick a stack that matches your team. Power Automate fits Microsoft-heavy environments. n8n and Make work well for cross-system flows. Custom scripts are fine when the use case is narrow and stable.
Build, run it in parallel with the manual process for a week, then switch over. Document what to do when it breaks, because every automation eventually does.