Dr James, 0s:

Guys, I can't believe we have yet to do a podcast on this topic because AI, that acronym, two vowel, double vowel acronym, I'll just try and think about that for just for a second there, is hot on the tongues of everybody out there at the minute, and not least whenever it comes to dentistry too, because there's so many ways that we can leverage off that. And I'm joined by Mike Beech of Agilio Software AI Expert. We're here to talk about how demo practices can leverage off that and also benefit as well. Because a lot of dentists out there, I guess they just don't have the time. They don't have the time to unbusy themselves, right? If that makes sense, right? They're so busy being busy that they can't actually use these systems and create these things. We're here to talk about that, how you can make a dental practice more efficient, and a whole ton other good stuff in the day's podcast. As ever, you can claim your CPD for this episode within the official Dentists Who Invest Smart Money Members Club. Smart Money Members Club also includes multiple mini courses and webinar series on finance for dentists, including how to become as tax efficient as possible, as well as understanding investing. All of this content counts as verifiable CPD, and you can download your certificates there and then upon completion of each lesson. In addition to this, we also include a whopping 10% discount on your dental indemnity and a 5% discount on lab bills for dental principals, amongst other perks and discounts for members. Please use the link in the description to claim your verifiable CPD for this episode.

Mike, 1m 23s:

Mike, how are you? I'm very good, thank you. And uh looking forward to uh talking through all things AI. Hell yeah, that's how we can make it work.

Dr James, 1m 30s:

Yeah, we've got the obvious ones, you've got the not so obvious ones. There's gonna be a bit of everything in today's podcast. But I actually really liked what you said just off camera, Mike, and correct me if I'm wrong if we've got this right. There's kind of two ways you can do it. There's two broad applications of AI in dental businesses. One is from the point of view of the marketing side of things, as in putting bums on seats with the patients.

Mike, 1m 51s:

I would say that, yes. It's uh helping you get your business moving forward to the way you want. So filling those empty seats, those empty appointment slots with the sort of treatments you would want as well, because not all treatments are equal. We know that.

Dr James, 2m 4s:

Well, this is true. No, you're absolutely right, and it depends on the practice, doesn't it? You know, they they they might want to focus on a certain area. And then the second side of things is more back-end ops, I guess you could say, and efficiency.

Mike, 2m 15s:

Yeah, which is the classic AI, um as people fear, unfortunately, which is yeah, you've got 5,000 people, AI can do the jobs of all of them, and uh you don't need them anymore. I don't think dentistry is that sort of situation because there's a lot of hands-on stuff in dentistry, but there's still efficiency, it can help. So even if it's just gaining them a little bit more time uh to do some other things. That's a plus.

Dr James, 2m 36s:

Yeah, no, 100%. And you know what we do got to talk about as well, actually, because uh, and we we can maybe touch on this towards the end. I don't know if everybody's aware of this, but there are actually robots now who can do crown preps on your teeth, and the dentists just have to oversee them. Obviously, the dentist is still part of the equation, guys. Uh, and incidentally, at the next business of dentistry conference, which is gonna be on the 12th of June in 2027, we all being well are gonna have one of those machines there. Oh wow. So we can really yeah, amazing. Hell yeah. We're gonna find a way, we're gonna find a way because I think people being able to see this in real life is just gonna be like whoa.

Mike, 3m 18s:

Robotics is a subset of AI, it's just yet another area that just advances so much. Every six months it's just leapt forward. So I'm not surprised. Um, I think robots will be a little bit expensive in the next few years, though, so whether it's worth it from a dentist's business perspective, but you can just see that will all change in time.

Dr James, 3m 38s:

For sure. I think it's it's when, right, rather than if, isn't it? And you know what I and again, not to sidetrack the podcast because I do I do I've got a habit of doing this, all right. So don't go never been known too much of a tangent. Uh, but you know what I find w interesting, we're in a place right now, you've got software and hardware, right? And we're in a place right now where the software is just going friggin' bananas, okay? Um, but the hardware's like trying to catch up a little bit, you know what I mean? Definitely. And it's like I saw this thing, I don't know if you saw it. It was like the most dexterous robot hand that's ever been created the other day. And it basically had you can imagine a human hand, right? But it was basically all these almost like flexible kind of semi-solid bands that were pushing up and down like muscles, and it had these little motors like cogs inside it. It was crazy, man. And um, when they figure out a way to put that on a robot, okay, and put the put AI, what they presently have in there, it things are gonna get real crazy. Anyway, uh, yeah. I mean, I I'm feeling generally positive about it all, I guess, really. And you know, the winds of change are coming, right? We gotta we've got to get on board, right? Because it's gonna happen either way. Yes. Do we make do we make the most of it or do we become like a neo-luddite essentially? Uh which we don't want we which we don't want to do. Uh, of course. Anyway, back to the subject matter at hand. Uh, Mike, uh, we'll kind of slap ourselves in the wrist there. I'll slap myself in the wrist for pulling that conversation. We can do another one on robotics another time. Hey, that could be uh that would be really cool. I'm gonna take you up on that actually. That would be really cool. Anyway, back to subject matter at hand. We talked about the marketing side of things, the two general uses of AI in the dental practice, number one being marketing, and number two being efficiency. Absolutely. What's where where should we start, Mike? What do you think?

Mike, 5m 17s:

Should we start with the the marketing side? Obviously, as the marketer closer to my heart as well. But uh sure. But also I think that's where uh as we were talking, how do you make money out of these things? That's an obvious place where you can start. Because if you've got more people coming through the door and sitting on the seats having treatment, you're making more money and you're not having to invest so much, other than in AI. Uh, and for me, there's sort of on the marketing side, there's two sides, again, two sides, there's always two. Uh, one is just that engagement with your patients, so making sure they turn up. So at the moment, nearly every dentist is going to send a text to say your appointment is such and such a time. Nearly every. Um, a lot of them will do phone calls as well, just to double check. Yeah, my understanding in the industry, you've still got 10%, 15% dropout people not turning up, something like that. Yeah, yeah. So you the mask doesn't take long to work out. That's quite a lot of money lost, potentially.

Dr James, 6m 7s:

Um and can I just ask, can I just add to that? The way an interesting way of thinking about that is that's 10 to 15% of pure margin. Are you with me? Yes, absolutely. Because that goes literally right on top of the profits. Yeah, the costs are already taken. Most well, there'll be some slight variable in increasing variable costs, but more mostly margin.

Mike, 6m 26s:

Yes, in terms of the people, in terms of your set of practice itself, your chair, all the rest of it. Absolutely. So just having a instead of going for that sort of text-based approach, that telephone, uh have something slightly more engaging. So whether you want to go full on AI avatar or it's like actually just the AI just messaging the people, and if they can't make it, uh saying, Okay, can I rebook you in? So doing it immediately so you don't lose that person. So just that sort of level of engagement early on. It's not going to catch everything. But if that can improve another 10-15% on top of that, that's yeah, you you can work out the numbers. So I think that's one area. And then the other side is just how quickly it's the marketing. So it's the pure you've got inquiries, how quickly do you respond to them at all times of the day and night? So you don't want your staff on call all times of day and night to answer queries, but uh why can't the AI do that for you? Uh if you've put a treatment plan together for somebody uh but they haven't booked it in, so who's following up on that? Who's yeah, giving them the offers, telling them when there's available slots, so again, using the AI to do that. And then finally, who's who used to be on your list but just you haven't seen for over 12, 18 months. So who should you be going back to? All of which is kind of already in your practice, it's people you know or have had brief conversations with, but uh yeah, you as a dentist um and your practice team just too busy to follow up on. So get the AI following up on those. So that's for me where you can I won't say it's easy money, it's not. Uh, and you still have to have it integrated into your systems and all the rest of it, but it is a definite way to get more business quickly.

Dr James, 8m 4s:

For sure. And by way of the actual, I guess, pragmatic, you know, how how does that look in reality? Is that email follow-up? Is that WhatsApps? Is that actual phone calls that are mediated by machines or all of the above? All of the above?

Mike, 8m 17s:

Wow. Whatever you're comfortable with. Um, and as obviously we were exchanging WhatsApp earlier. So you can go, yeah, SMS text, emails, the obvious easy ones, they're fairly straightforward to do. Um, but it I think increasingly you've got to move more to a WhatsApp world, to a conversational world for those. And again, maybe you refine this based on those customer preferences. So, how do they prefer to be contacted? Keep a note of that and and use the same channels. But yeah, all of those channels, including voice, um we're now at a stage where we can create the James Avatar on the website. So if people want to just come and talk to James and it would sound like you, look like you, move like you, and just ask questions, great, why not? The technology's here, that's not difficult. So sure, sure.

Dr James, 9m 4s:

Uh yeah, slightly more in, yeah. Assuming people desire that, of course. Big presumption there. Hopefully they do. Hopefully they do. Anyway, um, but yeah, you know the thing I think is really cool, Mike, and I'd actually like to bring into this conversation. Uh by way of the AI receptionists and everything along those lines. Um, obviously, whenever you have the traditional receptionist, he or she has to ring people. Yes. Uh at her and the bandwidth is one call at a time, right? And the thing that's that I thought was really cool about AI receptionists is they can have 10, okay, at any one time. And they can just be constantly working in the background. Um, so the throughput is increased, uh neglible negligible uh increase in overheads and fixed cost fixed costs and uh variable costs, okay? Uh, because it is a machine, ultimately. Um, throughput is massively increased. You know, you I've even seen systems nowadays, and maybe you've seen these as well, um, where automatically, the second someone drops out of your diary, instead of the receptionist, he or she having to also do that billion things that they're supposed to do during the day and also fill this slot, the machine can do it in the background. Friggin' crazy, makes complete sense. Um those are certainly the benefits that spring to my mind uh on that that I've seen before in this arena. Are we missing any, Mike?

Mike, 10m 21s:

No, I think that's uh you've more or less summarised that uh very succinctly in a good way of doing it, which is as soon as some as soon as you get a gap, uh every minute of the day you can be looking and say, Well, where's the gap? If somebody has cancelled, you've got the gap, that's uh who's the short list that you want to fill up with? So it goes straight to it. And like you say, uh a receptionist having to do that. One, it's gonna be between nine and five, um, which may not be the best time to catch people anyway. And two, uh they've got 101 other things to do as well, so they'll get to it, but then again, rightly as you've said, it's one job at a time. So yeah, how can you do ten of those? Um and g and reach out and and be a little bit persistent. So yeah, if the call doesn't go through, you don't then forget about them forever. You can put a call through, yeah, literally just schedule it again for another 30 minutes time, an hour's time the next day, whatever suits. So you can follow up.

Dr James, 11m 13s:

Wow, yeah. I mean, that was I guess something that I didn't immediately realize when I learned about AI receptionists, and then I heard someone pointing out that benefit, and I was like, man, that actually does make a lot of sense. Because initially the concept I had in my hand, my head was it was more like an AI voicemail in a way, right? Like if it was a missed call. And I get that they do do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike, 11m 35s:

They can do that.

Dr James, 11m 36s:

I get they do do that, right? But I didn't actually realise that it necessarily had this other scope for functionality, which uh heightened its value proposition even more, essentially.

Mike, 11m 46s:

Yes, yes, and I think before we sort of say oh AI can do all AI can do all of these, but not necessarily everything all in one go, if that makes sense. So perhaps one of the things to look for is just what exactly do you want doing in your practice and what tools do you bring in? Because not every tool will do all things. So before I say it will do everything, AI generally absolutely will, but uh there are specifics, it's like what area is it the more marketing side, is it more receptionist side, is it an AI scribe that you're looking for? There are at the moment there are different leaders in those spaces, so you you kind of need to understand your own practice as to what's going to benefit you most.

Dr James, 12m 24s:

Interesting. I have a question, and this may be a silly question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway because I actually don't know the answer to this. So you've got all these AI receptionists, and you know everything that sits on top of AI, and then you've got the AI under the hood. Is that chat GPT or is that something else?

Mike, 12m 39s:

Uh it will depend on the specific company you're talking about. Most of them will be using an LLM, large language model underneath it, so of which Chat GPT is one big one. Anthropics Claude is another big one, there are other smaller ones around as well. Um that gives you a base level of functionality if that makes sense. But then typically these companies are building on top, either through its own training, through its own guidelines. Um so, for example, most large language models, LLMs, are not dental specific, but you could be training them on dental data, and in particular UK dental data if you want it to be more localized. So you you sort of build on top of that. So think of it as a foundation, but not the final answer, if that makes sense.

Dr James, 13m 24s:

Yeah, for sure. I always wondered that. I was like, how does that work? And I don't know if you're able to say this or not, but do you have any preference for Chat GPT or Claude's insofar as what you think is a better uh under-the-bonnet system for these sorts of stuff?

Mike, 13m 39s:

I think what we're finding is it's horses for courses and it probably changes every three months as one horse goes ahead of the other. Um in terms just from a general business perspective and most flexibility coverage at the moment, and it will change probably by next month. Uh we see Claude as being a front runner, but you know yeah, the next latest release of uh OpenAI's models will come out, and that'll put it ahead of Claude, and then you'll hear a Japanese uh or Chinese uh LLM being coming out that performs even better on the benchmarks.

Dr James, 14m 13s:

So it's an evolving field.

Mike, 14m 14s:

It's gonna change all the time. And I think you get to a stage where if you're always gonna jump to the latest model, that might not be your best as a business, not the best strategy anyway. You just want one you know and can rely on and build on top of. It's a different way of looking at it.

Dr James, 14m 27s:

Good. I'm glad I asked because I I I'd always wondered about that, how that works. And I know this is your remit, of course. Before we move on from marketing, the other question to ask is let's talk about our maybe our channels, our our our socials, shall we say? Uh, with regards to Denison. Obviously, one of the most popular ones is Instagram, still to this day. Um, you can obviously do meta ads, you know, TikTok. Yes. Uh, I'm conscious as well. Some people do really well from that. Even email marketing practice employee too. There's there's what I'm saying is there's lots of channels, right? How can we leverage AI in those channels? What have you seen out there? Um, so there's a lot.

Mike, 15m 3s:

I've not seen them used overly yet in the dental world, but there's a lot of uh AI agents that'll be there that can help you. Um so, for example, you you put together what your general brief is and what you're trying to do within the space, and then you're getting your uh AI agents to essentially put together your social posts, put a full strategy together for you, which channels should you use, we'll give you your sizing for your images, give it an image well, ask it to generate images if you want to. So, yeah, give it some space. Here's a picture of our uh reception, make it look nice kind of thing, and take it from there. So it's almost limited by imagination rather than capability at the moment. But if you wanted it to, there are the AIs would certainly be able to run a whole social media pay-per-click advertising campaign. You do need to sit above it though, and you do need to make sure it works. So it's not for free. Um, but yeah, in terms of capability, absolutely you could do that.

Dr James, 15m 59s:

You know, I saw something clever this week. We're actually shooting this podcast on the 31st of October, 2026, of course, which is of course Halloween. Halloween. Correct. And I saw something interesting this week, and it was somebody posted something along the lines of um my patients for the week, uh, this Halloween, right? And it was them, you know, it was obviously AI, it was it was a joke, right? And it was like um in her waiting room, it was like the Joker in Harley, what's her name? The uh Harley Quinn. Harley Quinn, yeah. Sat in sat in the waiting room like waving, and then it was like her uh, you know, with the patient in the chair, and it was like uh what's what's what's the person called again? It was uh from the Adams family, the mom, the mom in the Adams family.

Mike, 16m 41s:

Mauritius or something like that. Yeah, something like that.

Dr James, 16m 44s:

Um I'm letting myself down here. Uh but yeah, it was it was uh let's say it was Wednesday Adams, right? In the chair, right? You know what you know what I mean? And it was all AI. It was marketing, you know what I mean? But it was it was fun and it was fun, it was clever.

Mike, 16m 58s:

It's good stuff.

Dr James, 16m 59s:

I I liked it. I thought that was very good, you know. And um, you know, the previously to actually stage those photos would have been a lot of cost and time and effort and a lot of you know fancy dress. Um, you know, how can I say this? You know, they would have it would have been a pain in the butt to pull that off. But like I said, they they used AI to do this. It was very clever. I thought it was quite good, really. Uh so yeah, stuff like that, you know, enabling people to express themselves, to express a little bit of creativity and their their zininess and bring that fun element to it. I I well, I mean, goes without saying that chat GPT and you know AI enables that, doesn't it? Oh UK dentists, Dentists Who Invests now has an official platform where you can learn about finance and obtain UK compliant, verifiable CBD at the same time. The only platform that exists on which you can do both. The Smart Money Members Club has hundreds of hours of mini courses, webinar series, and live day recordings on all things finance slash tax efficiency for UK dentists. This includes complete courses on how tax works for UK dentists, finance so that you can invest and grow your own money, business so you can improve your profitability as an associate or principal, and for those out there that want it, there's also a mini course and how you can responsibly enter the crypto space using measured amounts of capital. I've gathered this content from the best of the best I could find in each respective area so that you know that this is how people at the forefront of each field advise their clients. The Smart Money Members Club also contains discounts on common things that UK dentists need to pay for on a regular basis. This includes a whopping 10% discount on dental indemnity, the offer to beat your income protection deal no matter what you're paying, and for the principals out there, 5% discount on lab bills and 10% discount on practice insurance. These are designed to offer hundreds, if not thousands, in annual savings. The purpose of this members club is to not only boost your monthly income but also manage your outgoings as much as possible and therefore create more profit. To celebrate the launch of the Smart Money Members Club, and given that the CPD deadline is coming up soon, I've decided to offer the first month for this platform entirely for free. This offer will end in the coming weeks as soon as the current CPD cycle is up. To collect your CPD for this podcast episode using the Smart Money Members Club, feel free to use the link in the description of this podcast.

Mike, 19m 26s:

Absolutely, definitely. It can it should encourage your imagination and encourage your creativity rather than you just let the AI do it, it sort of things. Oh, so it can do that. What can I build on this? Like so, so that's the zony idea. How can I take these images and manipulate sounds is the wrong word, but enhance them to uh use within a campaign. Sure. It's just a good way of doing it. And you know, then it's gonna be pretty unique as well. So you can start tailoring it to be aligned with your brand and the way you want to be perceived within the market and how you want your customers to look at you. So that's also quite a nice way of doing it. You're not just using a stock image of a dentist stuck over a chair or anything like that. So yeah. Morticia Adams.

Dr James, 20m 7s:

Morticia, you got it, you got it, well done. Just come back to me. Just come back to me. Anyway, moving on. Anything more to cover on the social media side of things. We don't think we've done an app job, haven't we?

Mike, 20m 17s:

I think that yeah, I think there's in terms of social media, you can go all the way from your strategy and your planning and your posting and your structuring of that through to, I should say, ideas for content and then creating that content. And that goes not just for social media posts, but adverts as well. You can take it all the way through.

Dr James, 20m 34s:

Ah, we didn't even talk about pet ads. That's really true. That is a really good way of uh there's a really good use case for content that could be created on AI, actually, because making those flippant and filming pet ads takes a lot of damn time, right? It really does. And you can do a lot of that on AI now. Um obviously it's good to have your face in there and what have you, but it can it can create the uh the details of the image, sorry, the details of the reel or the video that you're using. It's it speeds it up. Let's just say that. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway. Fine, and also can give you analytics on the data, of course, that you receive from face from meta. Yes, which is very clever too, which is kind of like you know, a different language to us, Dennis, uh, because it's not something we're not necessarily marketers by background. Uh, and helping us understand that is obviously very valuable, which it can it can do. The the the the limit is your creativity, essentially, you know.

Mike, 21m 28s:

But by us talking about these things today, hopefully we're trying to give an idea, people can try it out, can try it for themselves, see what works, see what doesn't work for them. True. The creative juices with them. Yeah.

Dr James, 21m 38s:

We enable the creative juices to flow. Anyway, we've dealt with the marketing side of things. Let's maybe talk a little bit about back back office ops now. Let's talk about that.

Mike, 21m 47s:

Yeah, I think there's um two areas where I see AI already within dentistry that's working well. One is true back office, so it's your your HR systems, your compliance, and all that area, and just Having to manage it, which no I know nobody really likes doing, but every business needs to do. So having systems that can just help you with that, um, highlight things that you haven't done, flag what you need to do today to make sure you tick in all the right boxes. Um that's one obvious area of AI. And then I think the other one, I think we talked about it before, camera rolling as well, was just the scribes. So it's that you've got to take notes, so yeah, on each patient as you come through and what you've done and all the rest of it. If that saves you three minutes a patient and you've done 20 of those in a day, that's an hour saved. Now it may not improve profitability because you can't necessarily can't squeeze somebody in in three minutes, but I think it will actually help people get on top of things and enable them not to be using as much of their own time on that. And I think the accuracy of scribes now is just getting so much better.

Dr James, 22m 51s:

It's actually in that one specific use case, it's actually comparable to a human being. It really is because it's so much more methodical than a human might be. Um obviously that depends. And I guess uh how can I say this? Like say you've got it, say you've got contract law, right? So say you've got an associate contract or something along those lines, right? Short of actually hiring a lawyer, right? All of us are just gonna be trying our hand at that, really, because you've never done it before, right? And I would I would say that the AI probably surpasses us in that ability as laymen, obviously, not compared to an actual lawyer. You know, you want to get them to run over things as well. Um, but the fact that it is now better than the majority of people at these tasks is just is just nuts to me. Um, so I think I think that that is a really good use case to highlight just then, uh, which is from the point of view of contracts uh and compliance, of course. The things that you were saying were also additionally useful too, from the point of view of transcribing our notes and even maybe even going over, maybe even creating emails by way of responses to certain things that require our attention, in essence. So, yeah, I mean I don't I don't know really know how much there is to say on that one apart from it can literally do anything in your back office if you're clever about it. It can literally do anything in your back office if you're clever about it.

Mike, 24m 2s:

It's exactly as you say, and it again limited by connections to the systems and what you're able to put inside there and what you're able to use. But from if you go at the scribe end, it's getting to the stage. Even clinical uh scribing is it's getting better. You still got to look over it, it will make mistakes, it's guaranteed, it almost uh it will make mistakes, so you do need to look over it, but it can still save you time and effort on those. Um, and then in the back end, yeah, if if you don't have to go through and work out what training, what CBD people haven't done yet, but the system's doing it for you and telling you, look, here's your list here. Um, and actually, you don't even need to look at that because the AI is going to send out the reminders to your uh practice manager and your dental nurses that they haven't quite done this and need to be doing that. So another job done. And more importantly, it's then done on time rather than uh you're being caught up about it later.

Dr James, 24m 55s:

Yes, interestingly, some of the newer PMSs out there. I mean, traditionally you've got well, obviously, we're not hearing name names today, of course, but you've got you've got your your kind of OG PMSs, if you will, right? The ones from back in the day, right? And they're adding these things on as as additional features, you know what I mean? Um, some of the newer PMSs that are out there actually have all of this stuff integrated. Okay, so it will it will listen to you talking to the patient, okay. It will listen to you detailing what you're going to put in a referral letter, it will automatically draft the referral letter based off your conversation and the patient notes, okay. Put in your drafts in your flipping Microsoft Outlook or wherever you're going to send it from, have it there waiting for you, ready to go. And let me tell you, Mike, you know, as a dentist, the number of times I spent hours, maybe even one or two hours after the day was over doing referrals and other stuff was flipping bananas. And um, yeah, man, that is that I can just see that being a huge help. I can just see that being absolutely massive. And you know, it kind of plays into because Mike, I know that you represent Augilio, yes, and Ailio, you you guys have how can I say this? You're you're making inroads in this field as well, correct? Correct, we're making inroads.

Mike, 26m 8s:

I'm not going to pretend we do all of those AI use cases, though. So I think we are doing the two sides. So absolutely there's the marketing side. So we have a solution to help people basically write their marketing campaigns. So it's that messaging to individuals, getting people, yeah, making sure your chair's filled with the right sort of treatments as well. So doing that automatically as a dentist, you can just oversee it, make sure you're happy, click the yeah, I'm fine with that, and let it go away and message people, get people booked in, all the side of it. And then, yes, on the compliance side, absolutely have uh we call Leo as our AI agent. So Leo's there to help to review your compliance, what's outstanding, what jobs you need to do, and and all those other elements. Some of the things we have talked about, things like scribe, yeah, those are areas we're not not quite there. I think the PMS is going to be the uh mainstay for that area. But uh what we're trying to do is just make sure those other areas um of operating around a dental practice are covered. So and we make sure that they work well for the dentist. Because what we don't want is a dentist to have to then review everything, spend more time fixing it and spending time on the AI, which I know a lot of early trials that I've seen dentists take on AI, they sort of give up within a few months because it's just not working for them, too much effort. So we want to take that pain away.

Dr James, 27m 29s:

Interesting. And tell me on the compliance side of things, because I know that a lot of my friends and colleagues who run dental practice, right, their heads are spinning because you just have so many people to keep happy. And it's it's the nature, it's one of the characteristics of the business or industry that we're in. Yes, right. So it's not just you, it's not just you know, there's just so many patients, there's so many moving parts, even around staff members as well, and the other dentists, and yourself too, and your family, and everything along those lines, is one of the jobs where you possibly have to keep the most people happy, okay, um, of all time, right? And you're so caught up in doing that and worrying about your treatment plans and your teeth and everything along those lines. Compliance, yes, it is important, but it kind of slips down the roster, doesn't it? So the solutions that are out there, including your own solution whenever it comes to compliance, how much of your compliance can that handle? Can that take, can that make sure all your policies are up to date 24-7? How involved does the dentist need to be in that process? I'm curious.

Mike, 28m 29s:

Um, it it's one of those things. Could it create policies for you and put them in place? Yes, but that's not really what compliance is all about. It it's more about do you have a policy that you've agreed and reviewed and ticked yes, and then are you following those policies? Most importantly. And it can then say, well, yeah, if your if your policy is stuff trained on a certain level on these days and all the rest of it, have you done that? Have you done your fire extinguisher training? That sort of thing. So it can track to make sure you are there and following your policies. Will it create compliance for you? No. No, I'm afraid. Yeah. You still need to comply, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Software won't just tick all the boxes for you. Not legally, anyway. So gotcha.

Dr James, 29m 17s:

Okay, yeah. I was just kind of trying to understand how that works in practice, but you've you've articulated that. You've articulated that very clearly.

Mike, 29m 24s:

It's about saving you a bit of time without as you said, the industry is is regulated, so you're not going to get away from that. Um, and we probably wouldn't want to go away from that. We can see other industries that are less regulated, and you don't want that. So, yeah, it can help and it can help save your time. It's not going to do everything for you then.

Dr James, 29m 42s:

Gotcha. Okay, fair enough. So, yeah, maybe like uh almost like a calendar, I guess, really, to keep you correct. Insofar as alerts at certain times, or at least that's a component of it.

Mike, 29m 52s:

Yeah, that's going to be a component of it. Yeah, to make sure you're doing the right things at the right time, flagging, um, and your members because compliance isn't just one person's jobs, it's the whole, it's everybody has to be compliant. So it's making sure everybody is up to up to spec in terms of what they need to be doing, uh, and that's all there. And if there are any issues, flagging them to you, so you know they're there. So you just look for what the problems are, not fantastic. Chasing people.

Dr James, 30m 17s:

And I guess one application that we haven't covered just yet, Mike, is on the radiographs and x-rays side of things. Because I know this is relates to the operational stuff we were talking about before. I think this is worthy of its own little segment in and of itself. Absolutely.

Mike, 30m 32s:

And I think we're beginning to see not in the UK so much yet, but certainly seeing it in the US and Canada, where they are using AI to analyze analyse those uh uh grams, um, sort of generic term there, uh, and look to see what it can find in helping the dentists spot things that they might not have seen before. But then also what I found more interestingly is they're using the AI to explain to the patients what they can see and what they're doing. And actually, one of the things they found is that encourages patients to then do the follow-up treatment. So, because they feel like that they're not they're not being belittled or anything by dentists, they don't need to get it, they can ask the stupid questions because it's only to the AI. So I found that an interesting one. I've not seen that in the UK yet. I know there's generic studies going on in the UK uh that's pretty positive, but uh not those particular ones. So that's interesting.

Dr James, 31m 24s:

That's a whole other dynamic that I hadn't considered right there. How does using AI change the dynamic between the clinician, I guess, really, or the source of truth, which was previously the clinician, but is now the AI and the patient? And do the you know, well, you kind of answered it. I was just saying it out loud. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mike, 31m 41s:

And and I think the only thing I'd be very careful about source of truth, it's the source of help. Okay. The source of truth will always be the clinician, and that's me saying that, even though I'm not sure. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. No good point, good point. Yeah, so I think it's it it just enables people to ask, yeah, what they may perceive as the dumb question, or even just chat more openly about it, which yeah, dentists don't have a lot of time. So they can spend minutes, hours if need be, just going through well, what does this mean? What does that look like? What's uh going through ultimately though, the dentist is going to be the final the the source of truth and the final call. But yeah, just helping people engage. Yeah. It almost goes back to what we were saying earlier on the marketing side. They can have a chat about what they want and what they're doing, what days work, where is this yeah. If somebody's busy, the last thing you want is to spend 10 minutes trying to book an appointment.

Dr James, 32m 29s:

So for sure, for sure. Well, you know, you've actually just you've actually just pop a question just popped into my head, and I don't know if you I don't know if you know you know the answer to this or not. Does the AI, right, in these conversations with a patient, both on the radiograph front and also the receptionist front, does the AI actually say, Hey, I'm an AI, or do they just act like they're a human?

Mike, 32m 49s:

Uh depends on how you want it set up. I would certainly encourage most people to set it up to say, Hey, I'm an AI. Um, and be very clear that you're talking to a machine, not to a person. Sure. Uh just because AI, you you've seen the little caveats you always have on every everybody's products is AI can make mistakes, you need to check it. I think you need to be upfront about that. And I would imagine that will become uh a legal thing as well, that you have to say this is AI talking to you, rather than uh pretending otherwise. Might not be true in all parts of the world and all times, but I think that will be pretty important to do. I had never considered that until just now. What's the what's the etiquette, I guess you could say? Yeah, and I and I certainly know you're beginning to see um with messaging and things like that, it's like, is that the AI or is that is that person there who's just you don't know, and it's probably not clear, but I think as soon as you start getting slightly more conversations going on there, I think you have to be clear that yeah, this is an assistant. Certainly the way um Sir Giulio has approached it is we'll talk, this is the AI assistant, this is Leo, we give it a name and all the rest of it, you know it's the AI uh versus a person, and and I would encourage dental practices to do exactly the same.

Dr James, 34m 6s:

And question on that, I know we're slightly focusing on this for the moment, but only because I think it's going to be useful to the audience. Question on that, and that question was when the patient is talking to the the the AI and everything along those signs, um they when they learn that it is an AI, does that freak them out? Or are they okay with it? And I get that's hard to answer, but in your experience No, it's experience.

Mike, 34m 33s:

It's one of those things. If you just asked that question two years ago, I think people would get slightly freaked. Yeah. Now I think the majority not the majority, there are many people using AIs in their day-to-day, whether it's uh Google Gemini and they're just using it on the web search, they're not they're actually talking to the AI, the AI is telling them, or whether they are increasingly using Claude Chat GPT for their own things. Yeah, this um sounds odd. Uh or if one of the clubs is actually talking to uh some of the fellows there, and they were like, Well, they're using it for the recipe preparation. So they're using AI in every single part of their day. So it's becoming normal, if that makes sense. So I don't think people get as freaked as perhaps would have done a couple of years ago. Sure, sure.

Dr James, 35m 16s:

Normalized because they seem as normalized, yeah. Because they've likely used it in their own lives and they're they've likely been so impressed by its capabilities that they're now willing to accept it in return, I guess, in these conversations. Yes. I I and I'm I'm comfortable holding my hands up and saying that AI is better than me at like 99% of tasks. You know, but it's that a little one or two percent. You're holding on to the one percent. Oh, hell yeah. That's that's where I come good. I think anyway, I think. But it's the same with all humans, right? When you get you have highly specialized in knowledge in one area, right, and that allows you to govern what the AI is going to do. And the the limit or the bottleneck is your ability to ask questions, which comes from how much you know. You can't ask the right questions unless you have an idea of what you're talking about and what what concept you're articulating and hitting upon. How can you ask a question about something you don't know exists, right? How can you literally ask that, right? So you're the the the the bandwidth is your ability to ask questions, which is crazy, right? Um, I think because it's just it just shows you there's just limited knowledge at your finger limit less knowledge at your fingertips, uh, which I just think is fantastic. But yes, anyway, um interesting conversation, interesting discussions. One thing we still haven't touched upon, and we've got about five minutes-ish, is is is robots uh actually replacing the Dennis. Where where are we at on that front, Mike?

Mike, 36m 42s:

Uh so I think the robotic technology is further behind than large language models of the base AIs. So it it is developing, it is improving, it is getting better. I would say um, well, I think we maybe mentioned earlier there are some robotic technologies out there that can start doing treatments on people. Um, I don't think that's mainstream yet, nor will it be for a few years, but it will get there, that capability. Will it be cost-effective enough to use in every dentist's practice? Probably not for a little while yet. So I think dentists don't need to worry about that too much just yet. Will humans accept having a robot work on their teeth? Again, another line that you yeah, probably not. Having just said that people are very open to talking to AIs, would they be happy with a robot operating on teeth? Different matter. Um, so I think it will come. The technology will get there. It's gonna be a good few years though before you see them in every single uh practice up and down the country. It's uh don't need to worry just yet if you're a dentist.