Vision 2030 placed a transformation mandate on nearly every organisation, and the common mistake is to begin with the largest, most painful process. That is precisely the worst starting point.
Start with the repetitive, not the painful
A painful process is usually painful because it is exceptional: vague rules, many edge cases — the hardest thing to automate. A repetitive process with clear rules, an approval that runs a hundred times a month on the same logic, delivers faster and builds the credibility you will need for everything after it.
Measure before building
"This takes too long" is not a measurement. How many times a month? How many minutes each? Where does it wait? Without those numbers you cannot prove the return later, and you will be asked to.
The audit trail is not an add-on
In regulated environments, automation that leaves no reviewable trace is a liability rather than a gain. Every run logged, every decision explainable, a named human accountable for each output. That is what lets automation survive an audit instead of being stopped by one.
Keep a human in the loop
Full automation with no review fails silently. The patterns that last keep human review on edge cases and automate the well-understood path.
Next step
Pick one process, measure it, automate it, prove the effect — then move on. For budget, see what workflow automation costs.