Higher education has not been spared the post-pandemic staffing woes facing most industries. Back-office jobs are vulnerable to high-workloads, short-staffing, and turnover. Universities are constantly pushing to increase research expenditures leading to more proposals, more grant expenses, and more grant billing. Institutions are also in competition for the students, state funding, donor funding and high-quality staff. These trends cause significant issues in administrative offices. How can we retain staff, reduce mundane tasks, and encourage upskilling and service when personnel budgets are frozen or decreasing? Automation holds answers to this conundrum. Grants management is complex for research universities. Addressing this business area before others brings buy-in for process areas across campus. If grants can be automated, why not others? Beyond gains for faculty and staff there are additional plusses for compliance. Grants management is difficult. Regulations and rules that apply to grants are many and can differ from grant to grant. Programs rarely run on an institutional fiscal year. Costs are closely monitored and carry levels of scrutiny far higher than other funding sources. Grants are complicated and high touch, but there are steps that lend themselves to automation, and ROI is high. This approach can benefit all research-intensive universities. While rolling this first group of automations out, Georgia Institute of Technology also started to build an Automation Center of Excellence. The Center of Excellence, now firmly in place, is the foundation for creation and support of a growing automation program. Investment in this area gives Georgia Tech the ability to strategically build a program that supports critical growth areas across the university from grants to procurement and beyond. Panelists will discuss leadership support, grants automations, decision making, building of the center of excellence, and future plans for this successful program.