Have you ever wanted to time travel to see what the world was like in the past or might look like in the future? 

About 25 years ago I was working with a client in the water cooler industry to design a solution to enable their drivers electronically record deliveries of the bottles of water that sit on top of water coolers.  This involved visiting offices, factories, schools, an international airport, and even a prison! 

In the late 1990’s, it was rare to find an office where everyone didn’t have a computer.  Granted, they weren’t anything like we have today, but they ran accounting software, spreadsheets, and other software. 

That was until I stepped into an office belonging to a railroad company.  It was bright and sunny when I hopped down off the truck and got a couple of bottles of water to deliver. 

Growing up in Ireland in the early 1970’s, we had one TV station.  Unless of course you lived on the east coast of Ireland and had an arial on your roof that enabled you to receive the BBC and ITV stations broadcast from the UK. 

I know it’s hard to imagine today with all of the TV stations, YouTube, TikTok, Reels and all of the other streaming services that are available. In single-channel TV land, a friend invited me over one day to watch Dr Who, (a British sci-fi drama series that began in the 1960’s and is still running today, 60 years later!). 

Unfortunately, the only memory I have of that program is ‘daleks’.  They looked like upside-down armored trash cans on wheels, with large rivets, and two ‘lasers’ on the front.  They shouted ‘Exterminate’, ‘Exterminate’ whenever they encountered humans. 

The hype about Robotic Process Automation in Accounts Payable makes me wonder if people processing invoices in accounts payable fear robots coming to ‘Exterminate’ their jobs?  Let’s look at the reality.