Automation
Automation is software that follows rules you set in advance. It does the same thing every time and doesn't decide anything for itself.
Automation is software that follows rules someone wrote in advance. When this happens, do that. It runs the same steps every time, quickly and without getting tired, and it never decides anything for itself.
The word comes up a lot next to AI agents, and it helps to keep the two apart. Knowing which one you're dealing with tells you what it will do when something unexpected happens.
Automation vs AI agents
An automation does exactly what its rules say. If the rules stop fitting the situation, it carries on anyway. An AI agent is given a goal, works out its own steps, and changes course when it hits something new.
For example, an automation might email your team every Monday with last week's sales. If sales drop to zero because your checkout broke, the email still goes out on Monday, with a zero in it. An agent asked to keep an eye on sales might notice the drop, open the checkout page, and tell you it's broken.
Neither is better in general. Automation is predictable, cheap and easy to check. Agents handle messier jobs, and they can get things wrong in ways a rule never would.
Where you'll meet it
Most marketing teams already use automation: scheduled posts, email sequences, weekly reports, alerts when a number crosses a line. It's the right tool whenever the job is the same every time.
In AnswerOrbit, the weekly report and alerts are automation of this kind. You choose when the report arrives and set the line a number has to cross, and we send it when it does. See Reports and dashboards.