Unless heavy AI is involved, an automated program should be something designed to do some specific jobs. Where "job" can range to the simple scenario you talked about ("get in, grab and run away") or perform complicated operations like cleanups based on various criteria (e.g. stale stuff that's been ignored for more than some time should be...). So, I don't see any reason why a REST interface for automation should have less power than the interactive one.

On the other hand, it has to be considered that the interaction model is more or less "pull" with REST, and somewhat "push" with the interactive one. When you notify the user about stale stuff, you're "pushing" information, requesting for attention. This isn't probably the case for REST, where you would better provide means for questions to be asked (like "is there any stale stuff?").