Auxilis AI

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NHS problem

General practice in England delivered a record 388 million appointments last year, and reception teams absorb a lot of that demand by phone – 29.2 million calls in February 2026 alone, more than a million every working day. Yet the 2026 GP Patient Survey found only 57% of patients found it easy to get through, leaving roughly two in five struggling to reach their practice. The 8am rush compresses a day’s demand into minutes: patients queue, redial or give up, urgent needs sit behind routine admin, and receptionists spend the morning repeating the same questions instead of helping the patients in front of them.

Founder Story

Auxilis’ three founders each spent a career on part of the same problem. Nikos Ioannou (CEO) spent 11 years at Google leading engineering teams and gatekeeping its most privacy-sensitive Ads and Play products. Nassos Katsamanis PhD (CTO) brought fifteen years of speech and conversational AI from USC and the Athena RC; Beata Grzyb PhD came from UCL, studying how people actually talk. Generative AI could suddenly hold a real conversation but not yet be trusted with one. They founded Auxilis to close that gap where the NHS feels it first: the practice telephone. None are NHS staff or patients; clinicians shape every release. 

The solution

Auxilis AI builds AI workers for frontline healthcare: systems that hold defined patient conversations, gather the information a clinical team needs, and complete approved next steps inside existing workflows. Our first worker, Jackie, is an AI receptionist for primary care: she answers inbound calls, understands routine requests, and either resolves them end to end or returns a structured note to the practice. Sam coordinates asthma and COPD reviews, Joe handles treatment follow-up between specialist appointments, and Robin validates waiting lists. All run on one governed platform: tested before release, bounded by design, auditable, and integrated with EMIS Web, SystmOne, Accurx, Klinik, and SystmConnect. 

Impact

Actual. At Staffa Health – a CQC-Outstanding practice serving 17,000+ patients across three Derbyshire sites – Jackie handled 1,964 calls in May 2026: 64.2% fully handled, 853 resolved end to end with no reception involvement, averaging 3.6 minutes and answering up to 18 calls at once. That returned 50.9 hours of reception time in one month, roughly a quarter of a full-time receptionist, worth £10,000–£13,000 a year, absorbed precisely at the weekday-morning peaks. Of 219 feedback responses, 77.6% were positive or neutral, two thirds rating 4 or 5 out of 5. 

 At Deddington Health Centre, a 12,000-patient rural dispensing practice in north Oxfordshire, where only 44% of patients had said it was easy to get through by phone, Jackie piloted in May 2026 and went live in June after 88% of the patient services team asked to continue. Over the next 30 days it handled 2,191 calls, fully handling 72.8%, resolving 1,142 end to end at 2.8 minutes average and reclaiming 54.2 hours; eligible blood-test and cervical-screening appointments are booked during the call. 

 Expected. Each practice sustains roughly 12+ hours a week of reclaimed capacity; extending Sa