In one episode of The Simpsons, family patriarch Homer uses a ‘dippy bird’ toy to repeatedly hit a button on his keyboard, venting dangerous radioactive gas before it explodes. The consequences are hilarious, as one would expect. But in the real world, this reflects a very current problem. At that moment, Homer dealt with something faced every day in offices across the world: a mountain of routine tasks that suck the vigour out of professional life.

“Very few people go home and say, ‘I was able to open 500 emails today’, or ‘I opened seven spreadsheets and extracted two pieces of information’,” says Jim Walker, director of public sector marketing at UiPath. “No, it’s, ‘I got to help Mr Smith or someone get their insurance lined up’. They don’t celebrate the other stuff they have to do.”