Hi Joanie,
I took a few days off or you'd have been greeted much sooner, so a belated but sincere.... Welcome to The PainterFactory!
What a treat to come back to find such a fascinating artist as you has joined us.
I took a quick peek at your website and know I could spend hours there, just exploring and reading.
Wonderful work!
My own take on Auto-Painting is that it can be great as a basis for more finished work (i.e. the beginning of a background for a painting), and it can be used for various other things such as creating Patterns and Paper textures to be using in other artworks.
Painter artists here at The PainterFactory will probably give you different answers and, if they use Auto-Painting in their workflow, I hope they'll share how they use it.
In the meantime, I'd suggest spending a little time just playing with Auto-Painting to see what develops. You may discover some new ways to use it that we haven't thought of yet.
I hope we do see you around... really. It'll be fun having you here.
Cheers!