Automation is important in Agile processes to free up time for more important tasks, increase productivity, and ensure reliability. The objectives of automation include reducing code freeze periods, providing early feedback on quality, ensuring repeatability, and allowing changes to be promoted to production safely. Automation targets include continuous integration/delivery, unit testing, API testing, regression testing, and automating test support activities like data generation and load testing. The approach involves making automation part of the definition of done, pushing it down the test pyramid, aiming for low maintainability and using source control for tests. Upcoming challenges include testing new technologies like microservices, responsive UIs, AI/ML, and the increasing number of tools and frameworks.