The difference between an automation and a script that nobody wants to admit

A script that runs once, manually, when someone remembers to trigger it, gets called an automation surprisingly often, and the label matters more than it sounds like it should, because "automation" implies a level of reliability, monitoring, and error handling that a script triggered by memory was never actually built to have.

The gap shows up when something depends on that script running and it doesn't, because the person who used to remember to run it went on vacation, changed roles, or simply forgot. Nobody notices until whatever downstream process depended on it has been silently broken for a period nobody can precisely name.

The honest distinction: a script is something a person runs. An automation is something that runs itself, on a schedule or a trigger, with monitoring that tells someone when it didn't run or didn't succeed. A lot of business "automations" are actually the first thing, wearing the reputation of the second.

Calling a script an automation isn't dishonest exactly, it's optimistic. The fix is either genuinely automating the trigger, or being explicit that this is a manual process someone owns, so at least the business knows which kind of reliability it's actually depending on.