[juancn]

The usual argument is that the Jacquard's loom inspired Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine, used to tally the 1890 census, and became the basis of IBM.

Essentially, the speedups in textiles, inspired a speedup in computing (tabulating initially), which kicked-off the modern information technology industry.

And even if there wasn't any computation, it still is automated data processing (albeit simple).