The level of automation in steel mills is increasing like everywhere else, pushed by advances in technology that go hand in hand with customer demands, creating a virtuous circle towards innovation. Individual machines have been fully automatic for many years, but the focus is shifting towards better integration of heterogeneous machinery into a complete system that functions as if it were coordinated by a single “mind”. This article attempts to describe some of the logic and decisions that are delegated to automatic systems in modern roll shops.