The ways of solving the key problems hindering the development of the Russian economy are considered - a shortage of personnel, an in-crease in the cost of production and prices, increased competition in world markets. The necessity of transition from haphazardly developing digitalization, which does not solve these problems, to extremely specific areas of automation of the Russian economy is substantiated. Us-ing the example of the development of the automated control system, errors in automation management, its statistics and efficiency assess-ment are shown. A number of approaches to the essence and manage-ment of automation development are criticized; a system of new scientific categories is proposed (automation of the Russian economy, auto-mation system, economic results and automation efficiency). A hierarchy of modern automation systems has been built and a new system of quantitative indicators of their control and planning has been proposed. A number of proposals are given to improve the level and quality of de-velopment management and to stimulate automation at enterprises of the Russian Federation