That’s actually a big conversation we have often in my work area. Is leadership is talking about automating but not explaining what that means as a whole. So part of my rollout for getting devs into testing and automating is having that conversation of “what do QA/manual testers do now?” There is a lot of fear around that.
In my specific situation I don’t want QAs to go away, I still need an expert in testing to create plans/strategies, find defects and bugs, document them and help lead the team to fixing and automating the fixes so they don’t happen again. The core of the work doesn’t change, just having a slightly different mindset and a slightly different expected outcome now.