Depends on the exact case, but I've managed to convert many-step deployments into single-step ansible playbooks in not much longer than it takes to run them once.

Even at our super tiny 3-person operation this has saved a massive amount of time - it's even more valuable when it's panic time because a server went down due to disk or ISP failure and you know you have an ansible script that can get a new server up in 3 minutes flat while you grab the backup.