Agile teams rally around the theme of "eliminating waste." DevOps teams rally around the theme of "breaking down organizational pillars." In both, freeing up resources to do work that delivers value to users/customers is paramount. The benefits (and limitations) of the practices that result from these themes need to be understood to execute the practices successfully. In this article, we focus on one aspect: applying automation. Automation is an obvious way to free up resources and increase agility, because it replaces the need for humans to perform certain repetitive tasks, it is not a constrained resource in the way that headcount is, and it typically executes tasks faster and more repeatably than humans can.