At my first job I wanted to automate the way a customer bought a product and got the license key. But the project manager said not to waste time on this, he was going to do all of that by hand. So my obvious response was "What are you going to do when we have a crazy amount of sales and you have to handle all of them by hand?". His response was "I would love to be overloaded with that work! That means we are selling and have money to develop an automated system".

I learned a valuable lesson that day: Build it when you really need it. It's highly likely that you will never need it.