The patch maker that stopped trawling emails

Vision Meditech has made products for other brands for 25 years. Skin patches first, then cosmetics, capsules and other health and wellness lines. It ships to customers around the world from sites in the UK, the Czech Republic and the USA. The work is bespoke. Every customer wants something a little different, and every quote is built by hand.

That last part was the problem.

The hour that disappeared into the inbox

A quote request would arrive through the website. It landed in an info account, then went to the sales team, Sam and a colleague. Simple requests were quick. The detailed ones were not. A customer might spell out a patch down to the milligrams, then ask if the mix was possible, or if it had been made before.

The answer was always somewhere. The trouble was finding it. “I’d trawl through emails that could have been from last year, two years ago,” Stevie says. Certificates of analysis. Old formulations. A complex reply could take her 50 minutes to an hour. Some questions she could not answer alone. “I’d have to ring somebody in technical and say, can this be done?” A feasibility question could pass through three or four people. It could take up to three weeks.

Sam saw the same cost from the commercial side. Writing one response could run 30 to 45 minutes. Finding information on a product they had not touched for some time could take hours. “We had no mechanism of finding it,” he says. So the reply slipped. “That first customer, instead of getting back to them quickly, it could take a week or so.”

A colleague named Wallace

Sam had wanted to bring AI into the business for a while. He found Frntir at the London Business Show last year. “They had a little gimmick, a lanyard with your face that you could make into a robot. That drew me over.” Then came the real conversation.

Frntir builds Synths: named AI colleagues you onboard like a new hire, not a chatbot bolted on the side and not a custom system either. Vision Meditech hired one. It learns the business from the company’s own emails and records, then does the work. Stevie named theirs Wallace, after her late grandfather. “It makes it a little bit more personal for me.” The name stuck. Sam uses it now too. “What are we going to use Wallace for,” he will say in the morning meeting.

From an hour to a few minutes

The change showed up fast. Stevie pastes an enquiry into Wallace and asks in plain words. “What used to take me 50 minutes to an hour now takes me around three or four minutes.” Document lookups that ate 20 to 25 minutes come back in seconds. A customer gave her a postcode and asked which company to register. “I just went into Wallace and said, bring me up all the details for the company with this postcode. It was done within seconds.”

The three-week questions changed most of all. Stevie now asks Wallace instead. “I can go back to the customer the same day, every single time.” Before, some replies took an hour, some took up to three weeks. “Everybody now is within the day.”

The sceptic

The part Sam did not expect was his own team. He uses AI daily. His colleagues did not. “They were apprehensive,” he says. Stevie is honest about where she started. “I’m not somebody that finds technology easy. I never used AI in my day to day until we started with Frntir. I was hesitant. I thought it was going to complicate my life.”

The first week had glitches. She flagged them with a thumbs down, and Frntir fixed them on a call. “I actually thought it was me going wrong. It wasn’t.” A year on, she sounds like a different user. “I’m comfortable. I’d go as far as saying I’m reliant on Wallace now. That’s not something I thought I would be.” Her advice to anyone like her is short. “Don’t be scared. I thought it was going to complicate my life. It does the complete polar opposite. It saved me so much time.”

There is a quieter win in there too. Stevie joined after 20 years at another job, where she knew every answer. Here she knew none, and hated calling Sam for each one. Wallace closed that gap. “HubSpot has all of Sam’s emails and interactions. I get firsthand answers through Wallace now. I don’t need to call Sam anymore.” Sam noticed. “He’d say, how do you even know that? And I’d say, you told me, the other month.”

The edge

Sam’s case was never only about time. It was about position. “We’re early on this AI train. 99% or more of companies are not doing that.” Health and wellness firms his size, he reckons, mostly are not using AI properly. “That’s the edge.”

He thinks the window matters. “Every company in the world is going to have to be using AI, a bit like the internet in the early 90s. If someone’s looking at this, they need to be doing something.” His advice to a wavering peer is to start, and to pick a partner who will explain it. “Frntir is a personable company. It’s not as scary as you think it is.”