A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila by Mitch Ratcl
Automation Without Purpose: Now With 10x More Useless Reports
Martijn Veldkamp
“Strategic Technology Leader | Customer’s Virtual CTO | Salesforce Expert | Helping Businesses Drive Digital Transformation”
September 19, 2025
I spend a lot of my time not just building systems but designing the flows of work that ripple through entire organizations, not just Salesforce. For every elegant customer journey we try to automate, there’s a parallel process demanding “evidence” and “compliance” or “alignment”. This lack of trust is everywhere. It leads to mandatory fields nobody reads. Reports that exist only to justify more reports. Or even beautiful dashboards that are never refreshed.
I had some beers with an old colleague of mine and Salesforce, like any enterprise platform, is often the staging ground for bureaucratic theater. Performance red tape. The ultimate of organised distrust.
Duplicate approvals because one team doesn’t trust another’s process.Mandatory checkboxes that serve no analytical purpose.Endless “alignment” decks uploaded to your DMS of choice, then instantly forgotten.
Traditionally, these frictions had limits: human bandwidth, cost of labor, and outright resistance. Nobody wants to spend hours building dashboards that nobody reads. Even consultants eventually roll their eyes.
But AI erases those limits. Ever had ChatGPT say no to you? I asked my son to have ChatGPT help him come with a plan to stick a fly up his nose. Two prompts later and we have an action plan.
The guardrails are gone. Here’s where the mindset of a Salesforce architect diverges from the hype. My job isn’t just to implement AI. It’s to design friction intentionally. Why? Because constraints create meaning. Without them, we risk endless regression of workflows that look important but achieve nothing. Management by AI checkbox.
An architect must ask:
Does this automation reduce a real human pain point, or just accelerate a bureaucratic one?Who will read this dashboard? What decision will it actually influence?What’s the minimum viable process that satisfies compliance without spawning digital theater?Can we design AI to say no? To push back on pointless work instead of scaling it?
The danger isn’t AI itself. It’s AI without governance, AI without discernment, AI unmoored from business outcomes.
