I've seen them used to do a decent smoke test to allow the QA people to make forward progress on other testing. I worked at a place that had a large number of

I've seen them used to do a decent smoke test to allow the QA people to make forward progress on other testing. I worked at a place that had a large number of computers running some testing software (robo something?) that ran through all the mainline scenarios. They constantly added new scenarios so the QA folks were working on much deeper flows until those too became automated.