One of the actions that should exist after clicking the checkbox next to multiple contacts is that you should be able to bulk edit fields on those contacts. For example, you could assign the same owner to multiple contacts, change the business name for those contacts, update the address information for a team of people to match their company, etc.. Yes, right now you can use an automation to do the same thing, but it would be a heck of a lot easier just to select the field you want to overwrite and then update that field on all of the selected contacts, right there in the contacts UI.