Web scraping with Python automation allows for efficient data collection from websites using libraries like Beautiful Soup and requests. To set up a Python automation scraper, you start by sending HTTP requests to retrieve web pages and then parse the HTML to extract relevant information, such as news articles or product prices. The scraped data can be stored in formats like CSV files or databases for further analysis. Additionally, effective Python automation requires handling pagination to navigate through multiple pages and implementing rate limiting to avoid overwhelming the server.