Anyone who has been in a large supermarket, an airport terminal or a shopping centre late in the day has probably walked past a robotic floor scrubber without giving it much thought, which is itself the interesting part. These machines - roughly the size of a small cleaning cart, moving at walking pace, working their way methodically along the aisles - have become genuinely ordinary over the past few years in a way that more attention-grabbing robots have not. They are a useful case to understand, because they show what kinds of work automation actually reaches first, and the answer is not the work that is hardest or most skilled.
Floor cleaning in a large building has a particular shape that makes it suitable. The area is big, flat, and largely unchanging from night to night. The task is repetitive and has an unambiguous definition of being finished: the floor has been covered. The environment at the time the work is done is quiet and mostly empty of people. And the job is physically tiring and difficult to staff consistently, so the business's alternative is not a cheap and reliable arrangement but an expensive and often unreliable one. Automation lands where those conditions hold together, which is why it arrived in supermarket aisles well before it arrived in the corner shop or in anybody's office - not because those are harder in principle, but because they are small, cluttered and different every day.
What tends to be reported as machines replacing cleaners is, in the places where these are actually running, closer to a change in what the job consists of. The machine does the long uniform stretches, which is most of the square metres and very little of the difficulty. The person does the edges, the corners, the spills, the lavatories, the stairs, the things at the wrong height, the mess that is not where it was last night, and the supervision of the machine itself - filling, emptying, cleaning it, and dealing with it when it stops in a doorway. The uniform bulk of the work went to the machine, and the varied, awkward, judgement-based remainder stayed with the person, which is the usual pattern rather than an exception.
For a small business this is mostly worth reading as a signal rather than a purchase, because the machines and the arrangements around them are sized for large floor areas and the economics do not carry down to a shop or a small workshop. But the shape it demonstrates is portable and worth applying to your own work. Look for tasks that are large in volume, uniform in nature, unambiguous in what finished means, and done at a time when nobody is around. Those are the parts of any operation where automation of some kind tends to arrive first and work best - and they are not usually the parts that feel most burdensome, which is precisely why they get overlooked.