From a conversation with Tim Doyle, CEO of Eucalyptus, on the Be Customer Led podcast hosted by Marbue Brown, founder of the Customer Obsession Advantage and former CX executive at JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, Microsoft Corporation, and Cisco Systems.

When Tim Doyle's telehealth company Eucalyptus needed to scale patient support across four countries with different regulatory frameworks, he faced a choice most healthcare operators know well: hire hundreds more agents, or find a fundamentally different approach.

Eucalyptus chose the latter. The result: a 4x increase in patient volume with zero increase in human support costs, a 10-point lift in CSAT scores, and 60-70% of tickets resolved entirely by AI with no human in the loop.

"ROI is directly tied to ambition. If you go after hard use cases, you will see results. If you are timid with your approach, you'll see tepid results."
- Tim Doyle, CEO, Eucalyptus

Born in Complexity

Lorikeet's story is inseparable from Eucalyptus. Before writing a line of code, Lorikeet co-founders Steve Hind and Jamie spent months embedded with the Eucalyptus patient support team in Sydney, watching how they actually worked.

"We noticed really quickly that all of the support solutions coming to market were fundamentally based on just summarizing FAQ material," Hind said. "We watched the Eucalyptus team working and 0% of their day was spent summarizing FAQs. Their day was orchestrating complicated workflows to solve complicated customer problems with severe constraints."

Those constraints are real. In Australia, it's illegal to name a prescription medication to someone who hasn't been prescribed it. If a patient emails asking "Do you have Ozempic?" and you reply "Yes, we have Ozempic," you've committed a crime.

"We had to launch an AI agent from day one that would not commit that crime," Hind said. "That's the bar we held ourselves to."

Why Healthcare Patients Prefer AI

Lorikeet recently commissioned research on consumer attitudes toward AI in support. One finding stood out: consumers are 50% more likely to prefer AI support for questions they consider personal or embarrassing.

In healthcare, where patients reach out about weight loss, erectile dysfunction, or sensitive symptoms, this matters. Being able to talk to something that understands you and helps you, but isn't another person, can be preferable to speaking with a human.

"The reality is people want to be heard and have their questions actioned quickly," Hind said. "AI's ability to understand and empathize and then respond very quickly often produces a superhuman experience, especially relative to an overwhelmed human operator."

AI support as a catalyst for global expansion

Eucalyptus operates clinics in Australia, Japan, Canada, and Germany. Each market has different regulations, different cultural expectations, different languages.

"The nuances of communicating with a Japanese patient are very different to a Canadian patient and very different again to a German patient," Doyle said. "Solving that complexity has been the heart of the business model."

Lorikeet has four deployed engineers embedded with Eucalyptus across London and Sydney. The integration with internal systems and systems of record is at least half the work of any deployment at scale.

"It's easy to talk about the fun, cool technology," Hind said. "But actually getting integrated into internal systems, integrating with systems of record, it's just real hard work."

Better Triage, Not Just Automation

Not every ticket should be automated. What matters as much as answering questions is knowing when not to answer them.

Eucalyptus previously relied on keyword matching to escalate severe side effects to practitioners. If someone wrote "I have heart palpitations" and misspelled "palpitation," it wouldn't hit the priority queue.

"Now we read the messages and identify from the underlying meaning when there's an urgent medical issue," Hind said. "We saw a 10 percentage point increase in Eucalyptus's aggregate CSAT scores by using AI to put the most complex tickets in front of the best and most qualified human agents, as well as using AI to quickly answer the rest."

What Support Looks Like Now

Doyle's team is now thinking beyond traditional support boundaries.

"Customer support has a strange historical limitation," he said. "You have marketing on both sides and support in the middle. Now that we have this very fast, very high quality response system, the question is: why limit that to any point? Why not have customer support in this high empathy, high speed model deliver everything?"

For Hind, the lesson is simpler: "Every interaction a consumer has with your brand is your product. There is no difference between your app and your support email and your support phone number. It's all just your product."

Eucalyptus is a telehealth platform operating digital healthcare clinics across Australia, Japan, Canada, and Germany. The company recently signed an agreement to be acquired by Hims & Hers.