This paper explores the role of anticipated futures of automation in public administration. Engaging with ethnographic research with stakeholders from roughly ten municipalities in Sweden, this paper examines the tension between different ways of imagining automated work futures and the extent to which they are associated with (or not) technologies. Automating data-driven processes is believed to alleviate administrative drudgery and support a goal-driven, efficient public sector. Various stakeholders participate in the implementation of automation systems, including corporate actors, managers, politicians, and civil servants. This group of stakeholders has diverse perspectives and expectations regarding the future of work automation and its role in the organisation of public services. Some see automated work processes as a way to boost efficiency, productivity, and precision through algorithmic data processing; others, however, see them as ways to allow professionals to spend less time on repetitive, rule-based, and seemingly tedious tasks, so that they can focus on their core professional practice. Challenging established narratives about work automation, this paper suggests how automation can be used to visualise, think about, and communicate organisational change without involving any technology per se, but rather as an empty signifier to which future-making practices can be affixed and legitimised. By emphasising social expectations and experiences, the paper interrogates emerging automated work futures in ways that move beyond techno-optimism and economic-political goals of efficiency and optimisation, not the least by showing that automation is situated, social and contingent.