Small tip from an ex-QAer: Don't worry, once the easy cases are automated, they'll have plenty of work to still do. At least the good ones will. They'll start doing more extreme exploratory testing, setting up combinatorial testing, fuzz testing...

A good QA analyst is like any other good employee - they always have something else they'd like to test.

We are real QA heavy right now with non FTEs. I'm not saying they don't bring value, but the types of things they are QAing now is both new functionality and regression testing. I can't think of any good reason that regression testing shouldn't be completely automated.