Somewhere in most companies, someone spends part of Monday morning pulling numbers from three or four places, pasting them into a spreadsheet, formatting it, and sending it out. They have done it so many times they could do it half asleep. That is exactly the problem.
The tell that a report is a build job
If a report gets built the same way, from the same sources, on the same schedule, every single time, a person should not be doing it. Repeatable work with no judgment call in it is what software is for. The moment someone can describe the steps in a numbered list, those steps can run themselves.
Why the numbers are usually already stale
By the time a manually built report reaches an inbox, the data behind it is often a day or two old. Nobody notices until a decision gets made on outdated numbers and it is too late to matter. A live dashboard connected straight to the source does not carry that lag, because nothing sits in a spreadsheet waiting for someone to have time.
What to automate first
Start with the report that gets read the same way every week by the same audience: sales pipeline, weekly ops metrics, campaign spend versus results. These are the highest-frequency, lowest-judgment reports, and usually the easiest to wire up, because the source systems already hold the data cleanly.
What still needs a person
Anomaly spotting still benefits from a human eye, at least until you trust the system's judgment on what counts as unusual. Automate the pulling, formatting, and sending. Keep a person in the loop for deciding what the numbers actually mean.