# last mile automation - human glue between hundreds of automation tools i've been recently thinking about new concepts in the automation space. one of them i call last mile automation. it is about automating those very specific and custom clicks and taps and keystrokes that a particular human makes. the way each of us works is always weird and special. it's not exactly like the one designed by the product team. and because of that, all the software tools are never enough. they don't fit our workflow, and we decide that excel is just better. maybe a tiny feature or integration is missing, but we can't change anything since we have no control over the source code, and most humans can't code, especially complex desktop apps. vendors try to convince us they're the best shit, in reality we spend hours and days adapting them, sometimes weeks, months and tens of thousands of currency units as companies. ** in logistics, there is the idea of last mile delivery, and how it is still very much a human job. while likely some years away from a practical implementation, last mile delivery can be done today with robots and drones. ![[banana bruegel delivery 1.png]] still, it is hard to control those drones - it's difficult for them to move in unpredictable, custom, and changing environments. this requires much more generalizability in the motorics of those robots compared to a predictable layout of a warehouse. similarly, last mile automation is you copy paste from your browser into the doc. when you drag and drop an image from your company's repository into the presentation. when you click a link in an email, download photos, paste the archive into one folder, unzip it, and put the results into the other folder. those activities currently have no tools to automate them. they are the human glue between dozens and hundreds of automation tools that we use, no matter how advanced or sophisticated, always lacking the ability to rebuild himself in order to fit our puzzle. that's what i call **last mile automation**. --- // july 2025, berlin