Automating the most mundane part of a business process doesn't finish the job — it opens room for a whole new, more sophisticated layer of work on top, as happened when expense reporting evolved from spreadsheets into full business travel optimization.
Using expense reporting as an example, Stephen shows how each round of automation revealed new problems and richer analysis opportunities, like business travel optimization, rather than shrinking the task to nothing. ✦ AI generated
Stephen Sinofsky · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-07 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 39:30
The minute you automate the most mundane thing and think you have it all squared away, whole new things appear. Like expense reporting is a really good example: first there's nothing, then people figure out how to do spreadsheets, then people figure out, oh, now we have a whole system, we can analyze it, and now all of a sudden business travel, you get ahead of the curve.
verbatim transcript · starts at 39:30
39:30that a lot of what happens just in the micro at the enterprise level is the minute you automate the most mundane thing and think you have it all squared away whole new things appear like actually like expense reporting is a really good example. You know, first there's nothing, then people figure out how to like do spreadsheets, and then people figure out like, oh, now we have a whole system. We can analyze it. And
39:51now all of a sudden business travel, you get ahead of the curve. And you're like, well, now let's just use miles for business travel. Let's, you know, route our travel requests to the best prices we could get at any given moment rather than just default to one carrier. Let's use a specific credit card for business travel that buys us a bunch of different added benefits that we know matter to
40:13our patterns of travel. And so suddenly like there's a bigger job called business travel analysis that takes way more people than just booking the flights which everybody can just do on their own. >> There there's always another layer of analysis on top. >> Always there. But the analysis then drives new processes and new behaviors that themselves differentiate companies. Look, business travel is a to stick with that example is a huge sync in most
40:41companies. It's just a giant expense hole that they wish they could shrink. But once they can tie it to how things perform in their company, then it's more than just expense moderation. It's actually figuring out performance optimization. and figuring that whole thing out becomes like a different kind of job than just booking travel and analyzing expenses. It just becomes this whole remote work optimization tool and then it's a different thing. I think the
41:10other thing interesting not to double and you know to spend too much time on business travel but I think it it also ties there are the physical and like digital worlds like there are always things that there will be humans doing you know maybe it's not back office TPS reports but like sales people will be closing deal there will be human interaction to close deals um people