Ask what happens the day the automation fails
Every demo shows the automation working. The question that decides whether it is worth buying is what it does on the day it stops, and whether anyone finds out.
Automation gets sold on the good day. The invoice goes out, the message is answered, the report lands in your inbox at seven. All of that is real and all of it is easy to show.
The day that decides the value is a different one. A card expires, an API key runs out of credit, a provider changes a rule. The automation stops. The useful question, before you sign anything, is what the system does in that minute.
Silence is the expensive failure
There are two ways for an automated job to fail. It can fail loudly, and somebody fixes it that afternoon. Or it can fail quietly, and you find out a month later when you wonder why something stopped arriving. The second costs ten times more and it is the default in most setups.
Silent failure is not rare and it is not a sign of bad work. A scheduled job that dies on a billing error does exactly what it was built to do: it stops rather than producing something wrong. What is missing is the part that tells a human.
Four questions to ask before you buy
- When this fails, who is told, by what channel, and how fast?
- Does it stop, or does it keep going with partial data? Stopping is usually the right answer, but you should be told which one it does
- Where do I see the last ten runs and whether they worked?
- What does it depend on that can expire: cards, keys, tokens, passwords — and what is the renewal date for each?
That last question catches more outages than any amount of monitoring. Most automation that goes quiet did not break; something attached to it simply expired, and nobody owned the calendar entry.
What good looks like
It is not complicated and it should not cost much. One email or one WhatsApp message to a named person when a run fails, and a place that person can open to see whether last night worked. If a proposal does not include those two things, ask for them before you ask for anything else.
Automation does not remove the need for someone to be responsible. It changes what they are responsible for: not doing the task, but noticing when the task stopped being done.