Quickfire Round - 20 Automation Questions in 2 minutes with Jesse Tutt

[Michael_S]

Hello everyone,

As many of you will know, we're very lucky to have a community rich with deeply experienced automation professionals. @BradHairston spent a short time with one such legend, Jesse Tutt (Intelligent Automation Program Director at Alberta Health Services - @jessetutt), on a call recently - and took full advantage by getting 20 answers to 20 burning questions in just over 2 minutes.

This is too good not to share, so here's the full video complete with captions. If you're more of a reader, there's the full Q&A in a table below, too.

#	Question	Jesse’s Answer
1	What does intelligent automation mean to you?	Automation, technology, and analytics.
2	What's your personal mission in automation?	Automate the work that people hate doing.
3	How does automation create value beyond cost savings?	Makes work more rewarding.
4	How should leaders measure ROI?	Task automated times the amount of minutes that it takes to do the work manually times the salary.
5	How do you convince executives to invest?	Show them quick wins.
6	What's the first step before deploying automation?	Recording every step in the process using capture or, or a video.
7	How do you pick the right processes?	Repetitive, high volume, and rules based.
8	What mistakes do companies make starting out?	They try to automate extremely complex automation with a ton of people.
9	How do you scale automation?	Reusable components and reusable code.
10	Why are APIs so important?	They allow your automation to connect to AI and other systems.
11	How do you get employees excited about automation?	Show them that automations don't take their jobs.
12	Does automation replace or augment humans?	Augments. It definitely does not replace. We haven't let a single person go in our organization.
13	What trend will define the next five years?	The alignment of virtual and physical robots.
14	How does Gen AI change automation?	Enables automations to understand unstructured data.
15	How has automation impacted healthcare there in Alberta?	Faster patient care.
16	What opportunities exist for IT talent?	With the push in AI, learning intelligent automation is natural and needed because you can't use AI without intelligent automation.
17	What advice would you give career starters?	Learn automation, AI, and analytical tool sets.
18	How do leaders futureproof?	By embedding, uh, using a digital first strategy which leverages automation.
19	What's the biggest myth about automation?	That it replaces jobs.
20	And what would you replace or automate in your personal life?	My kids' schedule, soccer, piano, all these lessons, it's, it's almost impossible.

A huge thank you to @jessetutt for the most insightful 2 minutes of 2026! 

I would very much like to hear other's opinions on the questions we covered, so join me in the comments. What advice would you give to career starters in automation? What trends do you see impacting our work in the next 5 years? I'd enjoy the chance to hear from you.