What it is and how to get started – WHIO TV 7 and WHIO Radio

Enterprise automation: What it is and how to get started

Your team needs to move fast. You’re launching campaigns, closing deals, onboarding customers—and trying to keep up with everything in between. But as your business grows, so does the complexity. Suddenly, every process has a hundred steps, five tools, and a dozen people involved. Things slow down. Data gets siloed. And automation—the thing that was supposed to make life easier—starts to feel impossible to scale.

The stakes are highest for enterprise teams: You need to move quickly but not at the expense of security. You want to empower teams to automate their work but not open up a tangle of permissions and shadow IT. And you want to build workflows that scale across departments without creating more work for the folks maintaining them.

The right automation can clear bottlenecks, align teams, and help you scale without burning out your people.

In this guide, Zapier will break down what enterprise automation really means, the challenges that make it harder than it should be, and how large organizations are using it to work faster with control and confidence.

What is enterprise automation?

Enterprise automation is the practice of using technology to connect processes and software across large, complex organizations. At its simplest, it means replacing manual tasks—like updating a CRM or routing an invoice—with automated workflows. But at scale, it’s more than just shaving seconds off of a repeatable workflow. It’s about helping entire teams move faster, make better decisions, and stay aligned across tools and departments.

Think of it like a nervous system for your business. Instead of relying on people to pass information from one team to another—or copy-paste data between disconnected platforms—automation makes sure the right actions happen automatically, behind the scenes. For example, maybe you want to trigger onboarding workflows for new hires, or sync lead data across marketing and sales tools. You might even build an automated system for orchestrating approvals across departments.

Enterprise automation helps teams stay in flow without sacrificing control.

Challenges of automating for enterprise

At many companies, it feels like every team has its own separate collection of favorite tools. And in large organizations, teams may be completely lost without the ability to use automation to connect and streamline our processes across departments.

But without a strong automation policy, a high number of teams and tools can also create a roadblock to enterprise automation that smaller organizations don’t have to worry about. For example:

• Security. Teams want to move fast, but they also need guardrails to keep sensitive data from being exposed or misused. That means automation tools need to meet enterprise-grade security standards and offer transparency into how AI is being used.
• Access and permissions. Give users too much access, and you risk errors or security issues. Too little, and automation turns into a bottleneck instead of a solution. Enterprises need fine-grained control over who can view, edit, or trigger automations—ideally without creating more work for IT.
• The sheer sprawl of tools. Different teams use different tech stacks, and getting those tools to talk to each other isn’t always straightforward. A sales team might live in HubSpot, while customer success runs in Zendesk. If your automation platform doesn’t integrate broadly—or needs too much dev work to stitch things together—it’s hard to scale automation across the organization.
• Approval bottlenecks. Even simple automations might need buy-in from IT, legal, security, and department heads. And because priorities vary across teams, it’s easy for automations to get stuck in review purgatory before they ever launch.

How to know if your business is ready for enterprise process automation

There’s no perfect checklist, but a few signals can help you know when it’s time to invest in enterprise automation.

If your teams are spending hours each week on manual, repeatable tasks—or if processes routinely break down when handoffs happen between departments—you’re probably ready. You might also notice rising pressure to move faster without increasing headcount, or a need to centralize visibility into workflows happening across siloed tools.

Another major sign is if you’re already automating, but it’s happening in pockets. Maybe marketing has a few automation rules set up inside Salesforce, and IT has built some scripts, but there’s no standard, secure way to scale automation across the company. That’s usually the moment when investing in enterprise automation pays off—not just to support more automation, but to do it with governance, reliability, and scalability.

Types of enterprise automation

Enterprise automation isn’t one-size-fits-all. It spans everything from automating internal team tasks to orchestrating complex, cross-functional workflows.

When looking for information on enterprise automation types, you may come across terms like business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA), and intelligent automation—especially in analyst reports or vendor materials. Here’s a quick primer to help translate.

Table listing automation types and what each means. (Stacker/Stacker)

Zapier

While those terms are helpful, they refer more to the technologies powering automation, rather than who uses it or what it’s for. They also aren’t exclusive to enterprise-level automation.

Instead of dividing enterprise automation into those categories, a people-first framing is used here—because automation is only valuable if it actually helps teams work better. Here are a few common approaches to enterprise automation (each of which might use a mix of BPA, RPA, integrations, rule-based automation, and AI).

1. Departmental automation

These are automations that streamline workflows within a single team or function. For example, human resources teams might automate employee onboarding tasks like creating accounts and provisioning tools. Finance might build automations for recurring approvals or monthly reporting. Marketing might use automation to route inbound leads or personalize campaign outreach.

The key here is that the automation serves one department’s processes—but it still needs to meet enterprise standards around security, visibility, and access.

2. Cross-functional workflow automation

Many enterprise processes don’t stay neatly inside one team. A new customer deal, for example, might require handoffs between Sales, Legal, Finance, and Customer Success. Automating these kinds of end-to-end workflows reduces the risk of dropped balls, improves speed, and keeps everyone aligned across departments.

3. IT- and ops-led enterprise automation

Enterprise IT and business operations teams often build automations to support other departments. These might include internal ticket routing, system monitoring, or user provisioning and deprovisioning. Unlike departmental automations, these are usually built with scalability and governance at the forefront—and often involve more technical platforms or custom scripting.

As more teams adopt automation, IT will play a more central role in vetting tools, managing access, and building (secure) self-serve automation. But the best enterprise automation tools allow anyone at the organization to build for themselves, too.

4. AI-assisted enterprise automation

Spend any time online and you might think AI is just about generating awkward headshots or robotic blog intros. But in practice, it’s become a powerful layer for business process automation—especially at the enterprise level.

You can add AI to your workflows to do things like summarize long Slack threads, extract key data from contracts, or categorize support tickets by tone or urgency. It can rewrite messy input into clean CRM records, convert call transcripts into follow-up emails, or translate requests from multiple languages—all without human intervention.

Rules-based workflows are still critical (and often more reliable for repeatable processes), but AI makes it possible to automate more ambiguous or subjective tasks. It can interpret intent, generate content, and handle edge cases that used to require manual review.

It can even help decide what workflow to trigger next, which means you can use AI to add intelligence to previously static automations. With AI orchestration, AI can evaluate a request, determine the appropriate next step, and trigger the right automation—no pre-set trigger required. Instead of building static paths for every scenario, you can rely on AI agents to dynamically route work based on real-time context.

How to choose an enterprise automation platform

Once you’ve identified the processes you want to automate, the next step is choosing a platform that can support your goals—especially as your business grows. No matter what part of your business you’re automating, the platform you choose should be powerful, flexible, and scalable.

Thoroughly evaluate all of your options before making an informed decision. Here’s what to consider.

Infographic on enterprise automation and what to look for in a platform. (Stacker/Stacker)

Zapier

Know your automation needs

Start by mapping out your current workflows. Where do bottlenecks happen? What’s still being done manually that shouldn’t be? Then imagine your ideal state: Could leads be enriched and routed automatically? Could customer tickets be categorized with AI?

Make a list of the tools you use today, along with any you expect to add soon. The best automation platform will integrate seamlessly with your existing stack and support niche tools, not just the usual suspects.

Also, take stock of your workflows’ complexity. Some platforms handle basic trigger-action automations just fine, but if your processes involve branching logic, multiple apps, or custom code, you’ll want something more advanced.

Think long-term: Scalability matters

Enterprise automation isn’t a one-time project—it’s an ongoing investment. Choose a platform that grows with you, not one you’ll outgrow in a year.

Here are some questions to ask:

• Can teams across the organization build and share automations securely?
• Are there enterprise-grade features like SSO, permissions controls, and audit logs?
• Will pricing scale sustainably as usage increases?
• Does the platform support your current tools and any future additions?

You might also want to consider whether the platform offers tools beyond workflow automation.

Must-have features to look for

Every business is different, but a few features are especially valuable at the enterprise level:

• Ease of use: A no-code, intuitive interface means more teams can automate independently.
• AI capabilities: Look for platforms that integrate with AI tools or offer built-in AI features like summarization and smart triage.
• Built-in utilities: Tools like filters, formatters, and schedulers can save time and reduce the need for custom scripts.
• Security and compliance: Enterprise-grade security features like SSO, role-based permissions, and SOC2/GDPR/CCPA compliance should be nonnegotiable.
• Support: Look for strong documentation, helpful AI assistants, and access to real human support when you need it.

This story was produced by Zapier and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.

Originally Appeared Here