I started my career as a web developer and later moved on to system administration. My job title at that time was associate system administrator. I was training under a senior engineer. It was a software development company. So, one of the common service requests from the development team manager was to deploy software to the software engineer's computers. There were around 20 people in the company, and since I was a junior person, I always had to go and install those software on all 20 computers. It was painful, but since it was just 20 computers, it was somewhat manageable. But imagine if it was hundreds of computers; I would be spending days of doing boring, repetitive tasks. From a company point of view, it is still at the cost of operations. This was just an example, but a regular helpdesk usually gets requests which are small but repetitive, such as mapping shared folders, printer installations, customized application settings, and so on. Group policies allow engineers to automate these types of common, repetitive administration tasks. As an example, group policies can be used to push application installations, push new printer deployments, and map drives when the user logs in, and so on. This reduces the cost of operations as well as allows you to allocate IT resources for more important tasks.