The revolutionary use of automation combining artificial intelligence and big data analytics is finally coming in to land in fisheries science! The presentation highlights opportunities and challenges faced in automated monitoring of fish abundance, biomass, and behaviour. Automated data extraction using computer vision on robust and inexpensive camera systems is particularly valuable for increasing efficiency and reliability in monitoring that is currently difficult, dangerous, or prohibitively expensive. It can supercharge science. It can improve management – of wild fisheries and aquaculture. Increased automation helps to detect trends in the abundance and biomass of fish and benthic animals. It is also enabling more efficient monitoring of the extent and condition of fish habitat, of the presence of invasive species, and of interactions among species. New analytics are being developed as we move from the traditional scenario of having sample sizes that are often too small to be reliable, to a scenario of having far more data than fits on a hard-drive! So automation is creating new training needs and opportunities. There is a need for new statistical procedures for QA-QC and to avoid embedded pseudo-replication. And always there is the imperative for a sharp focus on outputs that inform actions.