Most Automation Tools Solve the Wrong Problem

01 /The Concept

Panorama is a platform that "frees up your time for creative work" by automating the routine, repetitive parts of your job.

The standout feature: the AI engine finds what to automate on its own. It does this by continuously monitoring what each team member does with their work tools during work hours. If it notices you fill out the same Notion form every Friday, it starts preparing a draft for you.

If after every team video call you create a task list for each participant, the AI kicks in automatically: it calls Granola to transcribe the meeting, extracts each person's action items, and posts them to the shared Slack channel with the right person tagged. A from the team member adds the task to their list. A prompts the AI to ask what was wrong with that task.

Panorama launched a couple of days ago, with an announcement on Product Hunt.

02 /Why It Matters

As one Product Hunt commenter put it: "most automation tools assume you already know what to automate – but figuring that out is already half the work"

"We're a small team using Slack, Notion, Google Workspace, and a bunch of other products – and I'm sure we repeat the same actions constantly without even realizing they could be automated." That's why he sees Panorama as genuinely useful.

Detecting those patterns doesn't take long, either. According to Panorama's founder, if a team communicates actively on Slack, identifying routines worth automating can take as little as one day. In the general case, capturing and automating most behavioral patterns takes a couple of weeks.

Conceptually similar logic drives Edra ([covered here](/review/buterbrod-s-bolshimi-dengami)), which emerged a couple of weeks ago with $30 million in funding for a business process automation platform.

Edra echoes almost exactly what the commenter above said: "Most workflow automation builders tell you – give me a description of your business processes, and my AI agent will start executing them. But getting a complete, consistent, up-to-date process description is already almost the entire job"

So Edra's core feature is an AI engine that monitors employee actions to extract and formalize process descriptions first – and automate them second. The engine can catch inconsistencies and ask the relevant staff member how to handle edge cases. It can also detect when standard sequences change and update its process maps and automation logic accordingly.

First key takeaway: the essential component of any modern automation platform is the ability to discover what needs to be automated. Without that capability, these platforms collect dust.

Second insight – worth sitting with: both Panorama and Edra automate repeating actions. That might seem like a significant limitation. But it's not a limitation – it's a design principle teams should deliberately adopt.

The rough rule: if you find yourself doing something non-standard for the third time in a row, you should either fold it into your regular process or stop doing it altogether – by eliminating what's causing it, or delegating it.

In other words, 90% of working time should go toward repeating actions. Call them process steps, rituals, habits – the label doesn't matter. Though it's worth noting that "repeating" doesn't always mean literally identical: even creative work like generating ad concepts should follow repeating patterns – reviewing yesterday's results, analyzing competitor moves, testing new angles.

Which leads to a perhaps surprising conclusion: the most effective productivity tool isn't a task manager. It's a habit manager. A random pile of to-dos rarely leads anywhere. You won't force yourself to go to the gym every day by willpower alone. You'll keep going only once you've built the habit – following a repeating schedule without expending energy on the decision itself.

A habit manager should help block random, unstructured action and build useful routines – automating what can be automated in the process. That's fundamentally different from the task manager concept, where you dump everything that comes to mind and grind through it by willpower alone.

One caveat: a good habit manager has to evolve its set of controlled routines as the nature of your work changes. Otherwise it just keeps you running the same wheel forever.

And a closing thought: a personal habit manager and a business process automation platform are, conceptually, the same thing. The distinction between personal habits and company operating processes is largely cosmetic.

03 /Opportunities

The direction that follows: build automation platforms – for business processes, or for personal habits in a consumer product.

The non-negotiable requirement: the core must be a system for discovering and formalizing those processes or habits first – and only then automating or reinforcing them. Without that discovery layer, the platform simply won't deliver enough value to get used.

Panorama is a simple example of this. Edra is a more complex one. But the underlying concept is the same. What platform built on that concept could be useful in your own work or life?