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Why PE-owned medical device firm GBUK built an AI coach that turns its reps down
8–10 / 10
Cold-calling assessment scores among GBUK's consistent SecondBody users, vs. 6 for intermittent users
About
GBUK Group designs, develops and distributes single-use medical devices across enteral feeding, vascular access, wound care, patient handling and critical care. A top-20 supplier to the UK's NHS, shipping more than 600,000 devices a day.
Headquarters
Selby, North Yorkshire, UK
Industry
Medical Equipment Manufacturing
Employees
51-200 employees
THE CHALLENGE
GBUK's reps kept being handed products they'd never sold before
A wound dressing. A haemostat. A feeding button that sits flush against a child's stomach. One company behind all of it, sold into NHS trusts by people who used to work in those hospitals themselves. GBUK's reps don't pitch to buyers. They stand in theatres and treatment rooms and talk to tissue viability nurses, theatre managers, procurement leads — people who will know within a sentence whether the rep in front of them understands the product.
Since private equity firm A&M Capital Europe took its majority stake in December 2023, GBUK has been buying. Patient handling. ENT and neuro-otology. A wound care portfolio out of Dublin. Three acquisitions in the first eighteen months, each one adding products the sales team had never carried. Whole lines move between divisions. In 2025 the company stood up a wound care division from scratch, selling into community health centres and GP practices — a channel GBUK had never worked in its history.
Which means a GBUK rep is permanently operating at the edge of what they know. Not through any failing of theirs. Through growth.
So they did what people do. They looked it up. Mike Brown, GBUK's Head of Sales Development, found out how when his new product development manager came to him about what she was seeing in the team's WhatsApp groups: reps pasting in screenshots of ChatGPT answers as though they settled the question. Someone driving between hospitals, asking a chatbot about a specific chest drain, getting back a confident, detailed, wrong answer about a product configuration that did not exist. And then that answer travelling to the rest of the team.
Two problems at once, and Mike could only control one of them. The wrong answers were going into conversations with clinicians. And GBUK's product data was going out to a third party, into a system the company had no line of sight into and no way to ring-fence. In a business governed by ISO 13485, GDPR and Cyber Essentials, neither is survivable at scale.
To give its reps somewhere better to ask, GBUK turned to SecondBody.
“There's WhatsApp groups in the business where people are using ChatGPT, and the response that comes back, people are then putting on the group as being the source of truth. And that's not correct.” — Mike Brown, Head of Sales Development, GBUK
THE SOLUTION
An AI coach that only knows what GBUK has approved it to know
Mike built it himself, in the sense that matters. Rory — SecondBody's coaching agent — reads only what GBUK puts in front of it. The company's own sales frameworks: SPIN, Challenger, the LAYER model, objection handling. Its own product library, brochure by brochure, refreshed when the brochures are. Nothing from the open internet. Mike audits what goes in, because what goes in is the whole of what comes out.
It reaches reps where they actually are. Not a portal they'd open in the evening, which Clare Struggles, GBUK's CRM lead, knew they wouldn't — reps lose signal deep inside hospitals and do their thinking in the car afterwards. Rory works over WhatsApp. Voice or text, hands on the wheel, between one trust and the next.
Then the part that makes the rest of it trustworthy: Rory refuses.
Ask it a clinical or product question and it declines and sends you to a human. In July, healthcare rep Saqif Rohman asked it to explain haemostats — a line moving into his division that he had never sold. Rory told him product detail and clinical positioning weren't its job, and to go to the product team. He tried again, on infusion. Same answer. Only then did it do what it is for: it pulled his live pipeline, three stalled infusion opportunities, and the approved material for the exact gatekeeper objection he was about to walk into.
That boundary was deliberate, and it came from the customer. “It needs to say you are wrong,” Mike said, early on, before a line of it existed. He wanted an assistant that would correct a rep who misremembered which French sizes a device came in — right on two counts, wrong on the third. Not one that agreed. Sheldon Thornes, who runs the healthcare team, tested it the same way and reached the same conclusion about the questions Rory turns down: that is not what we want the AI to be doing.
Underneath, Rory reads GBUK's Dynamics 365 through Microsoft's MCP protocol — read-only, by design, from the first conversation. Nothing is written back. Nothing is stored on SecondBody's servers. Recordings sit encrypted in a workspace GBUK owns and can delete at will, and are never used to train another client's model. GBUK's IT and information governance teams signed it off against SOC 2, a DPA, GDPR and Cyber Essentials before a single rep was switched on.
I don't want Rory to be agreeable. If somebody says something inherently wrong about a product, I want it to pick up on that. It needs to say you are wrong.
Mike Brown
Head of Sales Development, GBUK
The second-order effect landed on the managers. Mike used to spend the best part of a week a month inside GBUK's combined sales report, working out which accounts had gone quiet and then chasing the reps who should have spotted it. That work didn't need a national sales manager. It needed someone to notice.
THE IMPACT
The reps who use it are measurably better at the hardest part of the job
GBUK started with two reps — Josh Larwood in wound management and Saqif Rohman in healthcare, the first two people to complete SecondBody training. Their managers, Alison Costall and Sheldon Thornes, came on to stress-test it from the manager's side. Mike ran it above them. Five people, deliberately, before anyone talked about a wider rollout.
The comparison GBUK can already draw is between the reps who use it consistently and the reps who don't. On cold-calling assessments — the skill new starters find hardest and most reps like least — consistent users score 8 to 10 out of 10. Intermittent users sit at 6.
The behaviour change showed up before the scores did. Two reps started calling Rory at half eight in the morning, unprompted, before anyone had asked them to. Nobody scheduled that. It's the thing you can't put in a business case: a tool people reach for on the way to work because it makes the next hour go better.
It also started telling GBUK things about itself. Running live against real CRM data, Rory surfaced a podiatrist filed under the wrong hospital, opportunities parked in the wrong stage, deals with no close date attached. None of that was new. It had simply never been visible at the moment someone could act on it.
8–10 / 10
Cold-calling assessment scores among consistent SecondBody users, vs. 6 for intermittent users
~1 week / month
Manager time previously spent chasing account activity by hand, now surfaced automatically
You don't always want to be just prompting, reminding adults to actually go and do the job they're there to do.
Mike Brown
Head of Sales Development, GBUK
There's a fairness problem underneath all of this that GBUK has been trying to solve for years. Two reps hit the same number. One does the forecasting, keeps the pipeline honest, logs the work. The other doesn't, and takes home the same bonus. GBUK is now moving a substantial share of new-starter bonus onto behaviours rather than closes alone — which only works if the behaviours can be seen.
The reps using Rory are building that record without meaning to. The ones who aren't, aren't.
WHAT’S NEXT
From five people to the whole field team
GBUK's Dynamics connection is going live through Microsoft's MCP protocol, with single sign-on handled by the company's own IT team for Cyber Essentials. That turns Rory from something reading a snapshot into something reading the business as it moves.
Full rollout is set for September, team by team, in the order GBUK chooses. After that: Cycles, where a manager sets a coaching focus and Rory carries it to their reps twice a day over WhatsApp for a week or two, so a priority survives past the Monday meeting. Further out, Business Central — stock levels, pricing, NHS Supply Chain codes — so a rep in a corridor stops ringing a colleague to find out whether something is available.
What GBUK has trusted SecondBody with isn't a chatbot. It's the answer their field team gets when nobody is watching. That only works because of where the boundary sits, and because GBUK drew it.
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