So you are committed to paying for the remote hands and can't get out of it, or have already fully paid for lifetime support from the remote hands and can't get a refund :)
That doesn't mean that there can't be cost savings from automation. For example if it costs X in lost business due to a misunderstanding by the remote hands that extends the outage unnecessarily, then a certain number of times avoiding that X cost would pay for the investment in automation. You pay the "sunk" and the new cost but you avoid unnecessary costs in the long run.
It's all a matter of fully modeling your costs and benefits. Noting that certain costs are sunk is a partial model.
