What they do could be a viable thing to do, if getting your customers to spend their own money to switch from a manual system with spreadsheet files sent over w

What they do could be a viable thing to do, if getting your customers to spend their own money to switch from a manual system with spreadsheet files sent over whatsapp to using your API will enable you to be the only player who has a huge dataset with real customer data, which you can use to understand which subset can actually be automated using existing technology, and automate only that using deep learning or whatever (for which you want the biggest dataset you can get), and keep doing the other stuff manually. You win by making people switch to your API, getting network effects, etc. If you don't cut corners in the way you do the manual tasks and you charge enough to cover your costs, and enough tasks can be automated so that using your service is not more expensive than not using your service, you're ok. But you probably don't have the margins the VCs want.