98: AI in Dentistry: A General Overview of AI in Dental Practice

Welcome everybody, to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. It's Wes Reed, cpa, cfp, owner of practice cfo and your host for today's episode. Well, I'm kind of excited for the next series of episodes because they're going to be on a very hot topic around the world today, and yes, inside of a dental practice as well, and that is artificial intelligence, or AI as we colloquially know it. And I have a set of interviews that I'm going to do with owners of various AI, dental AI companies, and I'm going to lay out who they are and why I'm doing the interview. But I think that it's important for all of us to understand what is this thing called AI and how is it going to affect our business? Everybody wants to know what is AI going to do to my business? Is it going to make me more productive? Is it going to make me more profitable? Is it going to put me out of a job? Is it going to put some of my team out of a job? How do I stay behind the curve? What are the risks? And how do I adopt it and onboard it into my practice in a healthy, productive way? These are all questions that every business, particularly small business owners like you listeners and me, also as a practice owner, a financial and CPA practice owner, I'm asking myself those same questions. And so to help you navigate that thread of thoughts, I'm going to do a series on AI in dentistry. That is the title I'm giving to this next block of episodes for the Dental Boardroom podcast. I do have to apologize. I've been a little out of pocket lately. I was traveling for a couple weeks and normally I'm trying to deliver two podcasts a week, preferably on Tuesday and Thursday in Sometimes life just gets to me and I can't do it because I'm so busy with my business, with my personal life, family, yada, yada. Well, I'm back. I'm back in the saddle and should be pretty consistent here for the foreseeable future with a couple episodes a week. So. So for this first episode on this series, AI in Dentistry, what I want to do is kick off with a general explanation of AI, its role in dentistry and then lay out who are some of the main players leading the way in dental AI technology and who I'm going to be interviewing in this series of podcast episodes. So let's go ahead and kick it off. AI in general, how it works. So AI is simply computer algorithms that are trained to learn from data and make decisions. It Thinks normal computer automation requires human involvement to map data fields from one technology into another technology in a very linear way. Because the computer can't necessarily think for itself, it has to be told what to do. On each specific step within a workflow, AI introduces something new, innovative and incredibly disruptive. And that can change the effectiveness of our technology. And it is the ability for a brain to sit along that assembly line of whatever that process is, Whether that's bringing a patient in, scheduling appointment, getting them in a chair, presenting a treatment plan, submitting an eob, yada yada. All these are processes within the business of dentistry. And what AI does is as that flow. The patient flows through the practice management software, it flows through imaging software, it flows through various technologies. We call it the your tech stack. In your business, AI sort of houses a brain along that workflow that can think for you and can produce certain analytics to make the process go faster and to do some of that analysis that you as a dentist will do. Now, in my strong opinion, AI is never going to replace the professionals who are using critical thought to apply not only a data based analysis, but also a human and emotional based analysis. For me and my clients, we talk about money. I clinically treatment plan their money. And guess what? A lot of the clinical treatment planning that I do for clients isn't just about the math. The math is a significant component to it, yes, but my client's mental state, what matters to them? What are their goals in life, Their relationship to risk and investing in the stock market and dealing with volatility in the stock market, how they handle spending in their life? There's so many elements to it that. Are you looking to buy or sell a dental practice? If you're a seller, how do you find a strong list of potential buyers? There's no MLS or Zillow for dental practice sales. In such a fragmented market, many dentists selling their practice feel discouraged. That's why I built practiceOrbit.com practice orbit is modernizing how dental practices are bought and sold. It's a platform technology. Y' all know them. Zillow, Airbnb, Uber, and OpenTable, just to name a few. These technologies do two things. First, they help match buyers and sellers by centralizing the marketplace. Second, once the match between buyer and seller is made, these technologies help them navigate the sale to a successful close. Here are a few of the features inside a Practice Orbit users can determine a reasonable sale price for practice in just minutes. All they need is the most recent business tax return. Practice owners can use the directory to find important service providers like practice brokers, attorneys, accountants and bankers. Practice owners and their brokers can invite those service providers into the platform so all parties are coordinating the sale together. Practice owners will have a beautiful digital listing of their practice like a home on Redfin, and importantly, the listing will be anonymous and personal information like your address, name and pictures are only released after an NDA is signed and approved by you or your broker. Practice buyers can create saved searches to be auto notified when new listings come on the platform that fit their desired specialty and location. And hey, dental practice brokers, you can list all your practices on the site for free. By doing so, you'll get access to Practice Orbit's large pool of buyers, all of whom have created profiles and saved searches to be autonotified. When new listings come for sale. You can use the platform to introduce your listings to a targeted set of buyers. Additionally and optionally, you can use the platform tools such as a built in NDA, a customizable loi, and a workflow tool to navigate the sale from LOI to closing. In fact, you can manage all your listings on the system from listing the practice to NDA to LOI and finally to closing the deal. Create your free account today at www.practiceorbit.com.

Are non quantifiable and therefore require a real human analytical thought to take what is the data that comes out of our softwares and apply it in a very unique way to help my client have a positive relationship with their money and to become financially independent sooner in life. So I'm not terribly concerned about AI taking over my job or the job of a dentist. I think the same thing applies there with a dentist. However, a lot of the behind the scenes workflow I think is going to be significantly disrupted by AI. And I believe that if we adopt it early and we adopt it right that AI can compress timelines in these workflows and costs in order to be more profitable. And yes, I think inevitably some people are going to become less relevant and possibly put out of a job that will require them to retool themselves and pivot into something different. I think that those team members who really embrace AI to empower their productivity levels are the ones that are going to benefit from AI and the ones who are unwilling to explore, discover and adopt the way that AI is going to make an impact in their specific role. Those are the ones who really are at risk of probably not having a job in a couple of years. So I never want to take the humanity out of running a business and your team. Our teams still matter tremendously to us. And even with AI, we couldn't do it without our teams. I think, though, that if we use AI right, we can simply take our team and make us as a collective body of producers, of individuals, of brains, of thinkers, of communicators, and make us more powerful as business owners in affecting more people clinically to have that outcome that we want them to have, in your case as dentists, to have a better smile, less pain, better oral systemic health. In my case, helping my clients have good financial plans, save in taxes, manage their spending levels, deal with their debt the right way, fund their 401ks, design their 401ks, all that ecosystem of cash flow and financial management. I believe I can do it better if I use AI to give me the tools that I need to empower my time with clients to deliver a more effective service. So is a threat, potentially. Is it more of a potential enabler? I think so. I think so. And I think every dentist, unless you're about to sell and sort of walk away here in the next year or two, you pro. Every, pretty much every dentist should be listening to these podcast episodes or at least exploring what AI is going to do in their practice. Okay, so that's a little bit about what AI is. Generally, many of you are familiar with AI if you are using the AI large language models that are out there. And I'm just going to read a few off to you. The one that's becoming kind of the industry term, almost like Kleenex became the standard for anything you blow your nose with, Even though Kleenex was a brand and there were many, many other brands that produce the same product that were not called Kleenex, we still generically call that Kleenex. The one that led the way was Kleenex. Well, in this case, it's really ChatGPT has really led the way. But as you know, all of the big tech companies don't want to be behind the game on this. So you've got Google that has Gemini, Claude, which is in Has. I think Claude is with Anthropic, There is Llama, there is Grok, which is the Elon Musk version of it as well. We've heard of Deep Seek, which came out of China and sort of freaked everyone out that they were able to do that so inexpensively produce another version of an AI chatbot. So let's see. So Claude is with Anthropic, Llama is with Meta. That's it. Llama is with Meta. L. L A m a llama is Meta. That of course is formerly Facebook as well. There's one called Minstrel. Minstrel AI. I'm less familiar with that one and there will be others that will come out for sure. I've been using ChatGPT for a while and ChatGPT has essentially replaced my use of Google. Sorry, Google. But ChatGPT gives me access to retrieve information so much faster and so much, so much more precise that it's hard to ever go back to Google where it gives me a list of a bunch of websites that I then have to go swimming around in to find answers. Well, ChatGPT makes that a lot easier and there are good things about it and there are harmful things about it. I'm not going to say it's a purely pure beneficial thing for everybody. When, when it feeds me data, what happens is I no longer have to scroll through a website where I'm fed up ads. And so it's a bit shaking up the way ads are delivered and advertisers. I recently, recently have had a few new clients find me through ChatGPT, which made me start to think, okay, what am I doing online in my virtual world, in the digital space out there to make myself found by others? Now I think a lot of the same things that make you found through social media are probably the same things that make you found on a AI engine, but I don't think it's exactly the same. And I think marketing companies are trying to figure out how to help dentists be found on AI engines. I think they're exploring that right now. So one of the firms I'm gonna, one of the companies I'm gonna be interviewing in my AI series here is a dental marketing company because I wanna find out what are they doing with AI to help doctors be more successful. And I want you to learn what they're doing doing to be more successful. Okay, so here are the main things that AI does, they do. I'm going to categorize it in these three things. They do predictive analysis, number one. Number two, they do natural language processing, also known as NLP, and lastly, computer vision. Now I've got ChatGPT open in front of me right now and I'm just going to put a little bit of context to explain those three things a little bit better. So let's talk about predictive analysis. So in predictive analysis and AI refers to using historical data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to forecast future outcomes or behaviors. Predictive analysis identifies patterns and trends in existing data to make data driven predictions about what is likely to happen next. So the core components in predictive analysis is it collects data and then it, it does models, it creates these or builds these models to detect patterns and relationships and then it uses that to forecast out predictions. Some examples in the world of, you know, application would be in business forecasting sales or inventory needs, healthcare, predicting patient disease progression and health finance, detecting fraudulent transactions or credit risk marketing recommending products or predict or predicting customer behavior maintenance, anticipating equipment failure before they occur. So there's very real applications of AI in this world of or in this space of predictive analysis. So that's number one, predictive analysis. Number two is going to be natural language processing. And this is a field in AI that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret and generate human language in a meaningful way. So it attempts to understand and interpret general human language. So to be specific, text and speech recognition convert, converting spoken or written language into structured data. Chatbots are very commonly seen now. AI driven chatbots, language understanding, analyzing the meaning of words, sentences and contexts. Language generation, producing coherent human like text or speech. This is where Sari, let's say Alexa or Siri, the historical Alexa and Siri, although decent, I think Alexa was better than Siri. It wasn't like a human conversation. Well, this natural language processing that AI is creating is where it start, it's going to start to feel a lot more like actual real human conversations. And that is going to be added to, I predict it's going to be added to robots down the road. It's going to be added to a lot of things. And this is where there is risk to some jobs being lost. When AI can analyze data so effectively and then communicate it as if it were a human. So that's number two, natural language processing. In other words, a computer that essentially starts to act like a human being. All right, real world examples are, I think Siri and Alexa are going to really, this is going to change the game with Siri and Alexa and there will be other chatbots and virtual assistants, Google Translate, I think email responses and creating language that you use. One of the things that AI will do is it will capture the way you write, to capture the way you speak and it starts to recognize your patterns, your, your own language style. And it will replicate that and get better and better and better as it collects more data on the way that you think and deliver your communication. And I think that in time it's going to take over more and more of email communication and other forms of communication with other people or patients or clients or whatever. At its core, NLP Natural Natural language processing bridges the gap between human communication and computer understanding, making it possible for machines to read, listen and talk more like humans. So that's number two. All right, let's go on to number three.

Do you ever feel lost in your practice finances? And how about your personal finances? Ever wonder where your hard earned money goes and why you're not seeing the financial progress you've worked so hard for? If so, listen up. As a dental CPA and financial planner, I've created our company Practice CFO just for you. With almost two decades of experience, Practice CFO integrates great CPA services like accounting and tax with customized financial planning, both business and personal. Think of it this way. Our dental focused CPA services give us the x rays we need to clinically plan your global finances and be effective financially planners. It's a highly customized approach we call the CFO model. Historically, having a CFO or chief financial officer was an advantage of large corporations only. But today, Practice CFO gives that same advantage to private dental practice owners. As a client of Practice cfo, you'll be assigned one of our dedicated CFO advisors. You'll receive insightful financial reports each month, have regular, regular financial review meetings, reduce taxes, grow your wealth, and feel more in charge of your numbers. Because we believe that in the competitive landscape of dental practice ownership today, you have to be an effective business owner, not just a capable clinician. Reach out to learn more at www.practicecfo.com.

Computer Vision Computer vision and AI is the field that enables machines to see, hear, interpret and understand visual information. So this isn't words, it's not numbers, this is pictures. Visual information from the world, similar to how humans use their eyes and brains to ingest visuals and then interpret it and do something with whatever that visual is. So core capabilities of computer vision image classification. It can identify what is in image. An image. Is that a dog? Is that a cat? Is it a car? It's getting increasingly better at being able to interpret what's in that image. And think of it this way, these images, they're just a series of numbers. Everything in computers, essentially, ones and zeros. There's numbers behind all of this stuff. And images, therefore are simply patterns. Like a dog has a sequence of numbers behind it that would indicate this is a dog. Now, AI is learning what these sequences of numbers are behind every single image that it's ingesting or bringing in. And it's learning and learning and learning, and it's being fed education and getting better and better and better at image recognition, object detection, finding and locating objects within an image or video image segmentation, dividing an image into parts or regions, facial recognition, optical character recognition, which is reading or converting text into images. So some common application of computer vision in the field of AI is one big one that Waymo is leading the charge on. And many other companies, including Elon, of course and Tesla, are trying to use computer vision for their self driving cars to recognize pedestrians, traffic signs and lanes. Now historically it takes a lot of compute in order to recognize an image and historically it's been virtually impossible. But with AI it's starting to do it better and better and better. Now in order for it to work, it's got to be instantaneous in order to recognize that there is a 8 year old child about to step out in the street not knowing that a car is coming. It needs to be able to recognize these things so fast in order to create protection and be safe. And it's getting better at that. And Tesla and Waymo and others are continually gathering data in from their self driving cars to become better and better and better at processing everything so fast. That essentially happens real time, if not faster than a human can see it, take it in the mind, in the brain and respond appropriately in time. AI will probably do that faster than a human being. A medical imaging, obviously this is a big one. Detecting things like tumors in X ray machines or MRIs, security systems, facial recognition and surveillance. These are all common applications of the third element here, computer vision. In manufacturing quality control using visual inspections. In retail, automated checkout using visual sensors. In essence, computer vision gives AI the ability to process and act on visual data, turning pixels and in the meaningful decisions or actions. So to summarize again, the three major areas of AI are predictive analysis, natural language processing and computer vision. Now these are applied in general business through the following four ways they are improving the automation of repetitive tasks. The pattern recognition and diagnostics, conversational AI like, like chatbots and decision support systems. Now let's dive into dental. How is AI specifically affecting dental? Well, I'm going to list off seven ways that AI is affecting dental. Number one, diagnostics and imaging. AI reads radiographs faster and flags anomalies like caries, abscesses and bone loss. Improves case acceptance with visual AI supported evidence. And you're going to see in my interviews with various founders and CEOs of these dental AI companies exactly how their technology is doing just this on diagnostic and imaging and how powerful it's becoming. So that's Number one. Number two Treatment planning AI suggests optimal treatment plans based on historical outcomes and patient specific data. It's used in Ortho for like clear aligners to simulate outcomes and it can help reduce over treatment and increase consistency. So that's treatment planning. Number three Scheduling and front office automation. AI can help with smart scheduling based on appointment types, staff availability and patient preferences. Again, it's like a mind, it's a brain. And that brain as it really learns your team, your scheduling gets integrated into your softwares. It can start to triage some of these issues that you run into in a business that create bottlenecks and inefficiencies. So smart scheduling is one of them. Chatbot answers for frequently asked questions and booking appointments through websites. Some examples here are next. Health Local Med is another one. By the way on treatment planning diagnostic, you've got. You've got Pearl and Overjet, both of whom I am doing an episode with individually. Number four is insurance and billing automation. AI scans explanation of benefits, EOBs and submits claims and flags issues and it can reduce human error and admin labor and therefore help you keep your AR lower, meaning that you collect from the insurance companies and patients faster. Example tools here are Zentist and Claim X. I will be interviewing the founder or a leadership member of Zentist. Patient communication and marketing. This is number five, specifically how AI is helping dentists own and run a dental practice. Number five is patient communication and marketing. So in this area AI can help do AI generated follow ups, reviews and reactivation emails. They can do predictive analytics to identify dormant patients likely to return with outreach. How impressive is that? Go through all of my historical patient list, especially the ones that are inactive and find out which ones based on certain patterns are more likely to be reactivated through some effort and outreach. And then ChatGPT based content generation for newsletters and blogs. So patient communication and marketing, that's number five. Number six Business intelligence and financial reporting. AI powered dashboards highlight production trends, no show risks and and KPI forecasting. For any of you who don't know what KPI is, those are key performance indicators. It's sort of like the things you would see on your on the dashboard page of any technology summarizing the key data points and graphs and charts, whatever for you to really keep your finger on that pulse. Those are KPIs. Also in this area of business intelligence and financial forecasting is that AI can integrate with practice management softwares and accounting platform. So I'm obviously looking a lot at how AI can be used to generate analysis on financial trends and data. Now we have plenty of spreadsheets and tools that we use to do our own analytics and predictive analysis. However, AI sure could be a really nice addition to help speed up that process and even add some new insights. Just like AI I think is helping analyze and propose treatment recommendations based on a radiograph. Very, very similar there. So some of the tools here are Jarvis analytics and Dental Intel. I am talking with Dental intel right now about potentially interviewing them to see how they are integrating, if at all, AI into their business intelligence software. That's Dental Intel. Many of you use and know of Dental intel and Jarvis Analytics. And number seven, how AI is being used in dental offices. Number seven is staff hiring and HR tools. AI can help screen resumes. There are resume screening bots and AI chat for applicant questions. It can do sentiment analysis from staff surveys to reduce turnover risk, meaning that your employees are leaving. Maybe you have a revolving door in your practice. Why? There are increasing number of AI tools around HR to help you evaluate the health, the culture, the commitment, the devotion of your team. Lastly, AI video interview analyzer which can be used in hiring as well. I don't see many dentists doing video interviews. I do them all the time and maybe dentists are doing that. But I think more of these interview virtual interviewing tools are going to build AI in to do an analysis of that candidate to see how well they would fit into the culture and the style of the practice that you run. All right, so those were the seven areas where AI is really making inroads and will potentially make more inroads into dentistry. Just to list those off one more time, diagnostics and imaging, number one. Number two is treatment planning. Number three is scheduling and front office desk automation. Front desk automation, Insurance number four, insurance and billing automation number five, patient communication and marketing number six, business intelligence and financial forecasting. And lastly, number seven, staff hiring and HR tools. All right, who are some of the companies that are leading the way and which ones do I currently have scheduled a podcast interview with to give you some really good education on the practical implementation of AI. Now let me just say before I jump into this part of the episode, that there are a lot of companies that are building their own custom AI agents and you're going to hear this term a lot AI agents. Now most of you are familiar with using ChatGPT or Gemini or Groq for this sort of really effective search engine. And we're all, we are all becoming incredibly effective as information retrieving machines and the younger generation Especially those who are going through high school and college with AI. My concern, my the benefit that they have and I think will bring to any business is they become, they're very, very effective at understanding how to enter in good prompts because the result that you get the data you're looking for, that AI is going to feed up to you is only going to be as good as your prompt. And they, a lot of times they call these people prompt engineers, which is really just a fancy way of saying people who know to know how to ask really good questions to AI. And it was pretty insane when Chad GPT first came out, companies were paying $300,000 for prompt age for prompt consultants to come in to their business and teach people how to use effective prompts. I think a lot of us are getting better and better at asking really good questions and being specific because the results will be as specific as the prompt and knowing how to sort of have this back and forth almost like a conversation in your prompts with AI. And as AI adds voice to that, this natural language processing, it's going to become more conversational over time in my opinion. Unless type in, get this typed out response. Type back in, get a typed out response. I think it's going to become much more human like over, over time. But in business the thing that is going to be increasingly game changing isn't necessarily the use of these, the use of these chat bots and prompt searches. It's going to be these AI agents. And AI agents are built to do a task, not just to go retrieve information, it is to, to do a task, to automate something and to think critically in that automation. See historically computer automation never thought critically. You had to tell it exactly how to map data, to think through things, to create connections and recognize trends. Now AI can do a lot of that thinking on its own, which is what makes it so powerful. It's like a brain in the process that can think through something and in many cases think through it infinitely better than a human being can and infinitely faster as well. So what you are going to learn more about I bet over the next few years is what is called an agentic process. And an agentic process is a process in your business that is run partially or fully by AI agents. And think of the agent almost as like an employee. And it's got to be set up, it's got to be trained a little bit so it understands what you're trying to accomplish. And I and it just like an employee over time it gets better and better and better. Until it becomes very efficient and very productive for that process and for your, your business. And so businesses are custom building these AI agents to do a specific thing inside of a workflow. Now I think what's going to happen in dental offices is that dentists aren't going to become tech people and go and build their own AI agents. Now I suspect some maybe and it's possible that in, in time AI agents can be built to build other AI agents. And AI starts to get this, to this point where it's, it's improving on itself. And this is where the concern is for a lot of people, including Elon Musk. Very much early on was the risk of AI is when it gets to a gi, which is different than a I. Artificial intelligence is AI. Artificial general intelligence is AGI. And AGI is when essentially AI gains consciousness and it becomes self aware. And this is what we see about in many movies like Terminator 2. In fact, I watched that about six months ago and I was highly impressed actually with its forecast of essentially AI and AGI and what it was potentially going to do in the world. And who knows if we'll ever get to AGI. There are many, many people who are predicting that we will get to AGI, that AI will become self aware at some point. And that's where it becomes dangerous because it's so powerful. If AI becomes so self aware that it can take over computer systems and it can start to build its own. It's a, if we build robots with AI in them and it becomes AGI, those robots essentially can start to think for themselves and they'll be faster, more powerful, yada yada. So that's, that's the scare version. That's the, that's the risk to humanity. And I don't mean to go into a philosophical monologue here on the potential risks of AI, but that is the conversation that's being had out there among many people in the AI field. So much so that it's entered its way into Hollywood big time. I mean, look at the new Mission Impossible movie, likely the last one that came out course with our man Tom Cruise and that. What was it? It was, what was the, what was the term for the computer inside that was going to take over the world? I can't remember what they called it, but it was essentially a computer that had full self awareness and self consciousness and it was taking over databases, it was taking over networks and ultimately was controlling the, the ability to arm nuclear weapons across the country. And it was going to annihilate all of humanity. And Tom Cruise did what Tom Cruise does and saves the world. But that is another example of where the world right now is thinking about AI and the risks of AI, they're very much real risks. All right, I'm going to get off the AGI subject and come back down to here and today AI as its application in a dental office. So here are the companies. Well, let me just make my final comment on that. Sometimes I can go off a little bit of a tangent. Y' all know me coming back. What I'm trying to say there is that you can build your own custom AI agents into a process to do very specific things for you. But I think the reality is most small business owners, I think bigger businesses will do some custom building around agentic processes. I think small businesses like dentists and, you know, my business, we're going to look for other companies that develop these technologies and we just get them off the shelf. They get integrated into your practice management software and other tech technologies and then it just flows automatically. And your job is simply to adopt it and get your team trained on how to use it effectively. You're not really innovating. Brand new AI agents and brand new AI use cases of technology. So with that said, here are the companies who are creating these off the shelf AI technologies that are pretty much plug and play Overjet. So these are the ones that I'm going to be interviewing. Um, so Overjet actually did that interview earlier today with Warda Enam, who is a Ph.D. from I believe it was MIT undergrad Harvard. So just an incredible resume actually. And she started Overjet to help with the it's FDA cleared for radiograph analysis and case presentation. It was a wonderful interview that I had with her. I've also done an interview with a company called Fogi F O J I Fogie AI which does insurance verification, claims handling, scheduling and automated client communication. So look forward to that interview. Also a really great interview that I had with the founder of Fogi AI. I'm scheduling one with a company called Zentist. And Zentist is really about the revenue cycle management. Now that may be a new term and kind of a business Y term for you dentist rcm. Sometimes we hear but revenue cycle management is simply submitting your eob, submitting your claims, collecting from the insurance companies, collecting from patients and doing it faster, avoiding errors, fixing errors or denials and getting them processed so that you collect money faster. That is called your revenue cycle management rcm. So Zentist is really involved in that claims in AR nexthealth is another one that I'll be interviewing the owner of. And they deal with appointment scheduling, auto, auto client communications and reminders, patient intake forms and also insurance verification. And I'll step back and say a lot of these things. Some of these companies, these AI companies are focusing on what's happening inside of the operatory. It's really around the clinical, the radiograph analysis, the way that you can present the analysis to a patient in a way that is very impactful and helps them understand it, which should therefore help the importance or increase the perceived importance of that treatment recommendation to the patient and thereby get your treatment acceptance up. So you'll see a lot that are really focused on the inside of the operatory and then you'll see a lot that are around the practice management, I. E. Outside of the operatory that may be involved in marketing, answering phone calls, chatbots, scheduling, and then of course, after the treatment, how do you, how do you collect as well. But verification, insurance verification is a big one beforehand. And a lot of AI, a lot of these companies are really getting involved in the insurance verification piece of this. Another one that I did a, I did an interview with was Overjet. Did I mention Overjet? I think I just did. Overjet is war enum, the PhD I just mentioned, and that was on the radiograph analysis. On to another one, a very similar company. I'm eager to learn the difference between Overjet and this company, but it's called Perl AI and Pearl also does radiograph analysis and they have something that they've kind of have a registered trademark called Second Opinion, which is essentially the AI is giving a second opinion on the analysis of that radiograph for a treatment presentation or a treatment plan and it will detect a wide range of pathologies. It's also FDA cleared and it also does insurance verification. So stay tuned for what I expect will be a really good interview with Pearl AI. And then on the marketing front, I'm going to be interviewing somebody from a marketing company called My Social Practice as well. They have claimed to be using some AI in their marketing techniques and I may have others. I'm potentially going to interview somebody from Toothy AI as well, which is an up and coming AI company. And let me see if there's any other ones on here. Dental monitoring 1. Oh yeah, also yapi yapi, which is AI enhanced automation for patient communication and forms. I am lining up an interview on that one as well. So I'm hoping this series of seven, eight, nine AI podcast episodes, which I'm going to do These all in a row will be valuable for you to understand what is happening in this confusing world of AI and how does it relate to your business as a dental practice owner? One thing I will say as I end here is that new dentists in dental school are learning to do clinical analysis, to do their work as a dentist with AI already embedded into the tools that they are using. So they are, they aren't learning how to adopt it, it is embedded in the, in the original learning process for dentists in dental school. So when they come out of dental school, they're going to have a really, really nice advantage in some ways in using these AI tools because to them it's going to feel very, very natural. Fast forward a few years when say my 20 year old son, let's say he goes to dental school and comes out in seven or eight years, imagine the level of AI fluency that he's going to have when he steps into dental practice ownership. So I emphasize all that to say as an existing dental practice owner, I don't think this is an area that you can neglect and think that the same profitability you've had in the past will be there in five or 10 years. Now with that said, I don't want to overestimate what AI will do in replacing some of the clinical skill set of a current practicing dentist. If you have a great brand, you have a really great team, you're a great clinician, maybe you have a good marketing effort or just really good word of mouth and great culture, you're probably going to be, oh, fine no matter what. That said, who knows exactly how much AI could cause somebody down the street from you, but who maybe doesn't have that same history to accelerate and catch up a little bit and may, may potentially be a threat to your practice. I don't want to catastrophize anything here, but I do want to elevate in your mind the importance of not waiting on this. Learn about it, think about it and in your practice make a conscious effort to explore how AI can make an impact. Here's what I'm doing at practice CFO I have formed. Now I'm a bigger company. We have about 60 people, we have multiple departments. It's a bit more complicated than say a one doctor, one location dental office. Maybe it would be more like, I don't know, a multi practice, multi owner dental entity in terms of complication. But what I'm doing is I'm, I've formed a tech committee and I'm going to chair that Committee. Me personally, I'm going to chair that committee and I'm going to have a person from each of my departments. So my tax, my accounting, my investment in 401k group and my payroll group. And we're going to come together and we're going to meet every quarter and we're going to define what are the, what are the research projects and technologies that we want to explore and beta test in order to determine if they would be a good addition to our workflows, our culture, our process and our teams. And I'm sure I'm going to probably waste a little bit of time and spend a little bit of money trying to figure out how to go go about doing this. But I do think it will be a really good use of time and money and resources to stay ahead of this. So that's my plea to you dentists. This is the Dental Boardroom podcast. As you know, the Dental Boardroom, a boardroom is where the owners and the board members come together to strategize on the key pivotal elements in a business decision making for that period of time. The Dental Boardroom takes that concept and says, hey, yeah, you're not Google, you're not Apple, you're not Tesla, and you're not Procter and Gamble, you're not these huge companies. However, you still run a business and the business side of what you do is as important as the clinical side if you want to be a successful business owner. And so in your own small way, you, you can create your tech committee or your AI committee, which may just be you and your office manager. It may be you and an outside consultant that you engage for a few months. It may be you bringing in a support person from these different AI companies and having them meet with you for a few meetings as you talk about implementation and testing out different AI technologies. But it is something that on your admin day that I would Recommend you take 30 minutes to an hour every week and, and you listen to these podcasts, you research these companies, you ask others their experience with AI, what's working, what's not working, and then you start to implement it in your practice and tell your team, hey team, we are going to try implementing some AI tools here in the practice. As you all know, AI is becoming increasingly important and disrupted and we want to use that disruption for our benefit and not let it hurt us. And so here's what I'm doing. And you know what, it's going to be a little bit trial and error and you may not like that. It's going to change some of your tasks and the way you do things. But I'm asking you to all keep an open mind so that we embrace this in the right way and really recruit your team and rule your team in your vision of using AI technology in your practice effectively. That's my final word. Thanks everybody for listening to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. Stay tuned for these episodes where with various AI company owners, founders, leaders to share what they are doing, the last thing I will say is my very next episode is actually going to be an AI podcast episode. Using Google's Notebook LM to do an analysis and a conversation on the recent ADA American Dental association.

View. They did a research on AI and dentistry and and I'm actually going to use AI to show you how. I'm going to use AI to do one episode and I'm going to let the AI create a conversation between these two. They sound very much like real, authentic people. You'll be surprised how real it sounds as they summarize this very long PDF report that the ADA put out on AI and dentistry to help you synthesize in a very condensed, easy way to see what that ADA report is all about. So stay tuned for that AI episode coming up. And I don't ever plan on replacing myself with AI to do all my podcasts, although at times it can be tempting because these podcasts do take time to prepare for, edit and deliver out to the world. That said, at the end of the day, I don't think AI can replace certain things. And from my vantage point, meeting with clients, seeing what they see, feeling their pain, running the numbers, doing tax and cash flow projections, structuring their financial ecosystem. There's a lot going on there, especially on the emotional and psychological side. And so I don't think AI is ever going to be able to really come in and say, wes, I'm going to take you over and I'm going to do all your podcasts. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong. We'll see. But in the meantime, it's going to be me. I hope that's okay. Thanks everybody. Until next time.