They will think it, and it is not a fixation of theirs
Yes, someone will think it, and convincing them they are wrong gets you nowhere. What you need is to say plainly what you have in mind to do, because the fear of being replaced by an automation almost always grows out of the silence around the project
If one day a technician turns up, looks at the screens, takes notes and nobody explains why, the people who work there do the sum on their own, and they do it the worst possible way
Then there is the uncomfortable part. No supplier can promise your employees that their jobs are safe. That is your decision as the owner, not the decision of whoever writes the software, and anyone who promises it on your behalf is telling you a fairy tale that happens to close the contract
What disappears is the part nobody claims as their own
The share of work an automation carries off is always the same one, copying a number from a PDF into a screen, re-typing an order that arrived by email, renaming files, checking that two columns match
Ask anybody what they are good at and nobody answers that they can re-type invoices. They answer that they know the suppliers, that they can tell at a glance when a price is wrong, that they remember the customer who always pays late, and no program touches that part
After an automation, the person who knows the process is holding the part that carries the weight, because that is the person who dictates the rules to the system, who decides what has to stop, and who judges the doubtful cases the system sets aside. The work left to them is harder than the work you took away
This reasoning holds as long as the workload is there. If the office is chasing deadlines and the work still goes out late, taking away the mechanical part means room to breathe. If there is already little work the picture changes, and at that point your employees' question is a fair one and the answer is yours to give
Doing it behind their backs is the move you pay for
Deciding to automate a process without telling the people who run it gets you two things, both of them bad, an office that turns suspicious, and an automation built on wrong information
The real rules of a process sit in the head of whoever has run it for years, exceptions, shortcuts and the cases that end up differently all included. Only a person with no reason to hide them will tell you those things. If they suspect it is being used to push them out, they tell you the official version, which is the one that never works
The opposite road costs little. You say what you are automating and why, you ask the people who do it to tell you how they really do it, and you bring them into the rollout, when the system runs alongside and the results get compared. Whoever does the job today is the only one who can say whether the result is right
There is also a side effect worth having on its own. To write the rules into a system you first have to put them down in black and white, so at the end you have the process written down, which almost no small company has, and which you need anyway the day that person goes on holiday or changes job, as told in anyone doing nothing but data entry leaves sooner or later