Assuming your first sentence is accurate, I would disagree with the second. Making a bad process more efficient is a negative, not a positive, we should instead strive to improve the situation. The correct way to handle “busy-work with little value” should be to understand what lead to that point, fix it, then eliminate what’s unnecessary, not spend more resources (money, time, sanity) on making useless work be done faster. That still wastes resources and stresses the system, which makes it worse by hiding problems that will bite you in the future.

For example, say you deal with 100 emails a day. 90 of those are pointless busy-work and 10 are meaningful. It takes you all day. Now you begin using an LLM. You still have to separate the 90 from the 10 but then have the LLM reply with the 90 and leave the 10 for yourself because they are important and you have to make sure they’re done right. It now takes you a fraction of the day, so what happens is you start taking on more and more email¹. You’re now at 300 a day, with 270 busy-work and 30 meaningful (same ratio as before). Then one day your LLM breaks (ran out of tokens; a model was retired; bad connection; your powerful local machine broke down) and now you’re flooded by email and don’t even have time to separate the bad from the good, let alone prioritise and reply. If you had instead fixed the busy-work problem, you’d have been fine.

¹ Let’s be real: Work expands to fill the allotted time (Parkinson's Law). Those selling increases in productivity always promise more free time but what always happens is more work.