The secretary is dead. Technology and flat corporate structures have consigned the job to the corner office waste bin. In the future, personal assistants will be constructed from microprocessors and remote controlled. We are halfway there, after all. Want to dial your sales director? Ask Siri. Still determined to retain secretarial services? Then hire a virtual assistant, based in Mumbai or Brooklyn, by the hour.

The secretarial role crystallises fears over creeping automation of white-collar jobs. Once a concern solely for factory workers, today robots are marching into offices. Drawing on ONS data, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of the University of Oxford found that 33,000 secretarial roles had disappeared between 2001 and 2013, a drop of 44 per cent. That was just in London. In the UK as a whole it was a 47 per cent decline, or 163,000 job losses. Much of this can be attributed to the downturn, when employers reduced headcount and required secretaries to work for multiple executives. Research by the Roosevelt Institute, a US non-profit body, found that private sector job losses during the recession particularly hit female support staff whose work was distributed among others.

Despite the economic gloom lifting, automation remains a threat to the secretarial profession. “Secretaries are an occupation where the increasing ability of sophisticated algorithms to substitute for cognitive labour is already being felt,” says Mr Osborne.