Aaron West

Aaron West (32)

Senior E-Commerce Manager & Digital Strategist

A spectrum of customer interactions from routine (safe to automate) to emotional and novel (keep human), with the line marked where to route to a person.
Aaron West

The Five Things You Should Never Automate

Most automation advice is a list of things you should automate. This is the opposite list, and it is more useful, because the expensive mistakes in automation are almost never "we failed to automate something." They are "we automated something we should have left alone."…

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A before/after comparison showing a manual process failing visibly versus a silent automation failure that nobody notices until a customer is affected.
Aaron West

The Error Notification Is the Workflow

In December 2025, one of Amazon's own internal AI tools failed and quietly took down a system for thirteen hours before anyone noticed. Thirteen hours. At Amazon. With Amazon's engineering resources and monitoring budget behind it. I open with that because it settles an argument…

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An iceberg diagram showing budgeted costs above the waterline and the larger hidden costs of manual operations below: labour, errors, decision delay, and opportunity cost.
Aaron West

The Hidden Cost of Manual Operations

Ask most e-commerce teams what their operations cost, and they will point you to the obvious line items. Software subscriptions. Fulfilment fees. Headcount. What almost nobody can tell you is the cost of the work itself, the hours that disappear every week into copying data…

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