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The practice ownership podcast for dentists ready to start, buy, or grow their dental business.
Mike Dinsio, MBA and Paula Quinn, BSDH have joined forces, combining their past shows "Startup Unscripted" and "Dental Acquisition Unscripted" into one powerful channel. Together they bring 30+ years of dental industry experience with a modern approach to the business of dentistry.
Each episode features unscripted conversations with expert guests who share real experiences, proven strategies, and actionable insights on dental practice ownership. Whether you're new to ownership, planning a dental startup, or navigating a practice acquisitionāwe've got you covered.
FRESH CONTENT ON:
ā How to start a dental practice from scratch
ā Buying a dental practice: What you need to know
ā Practice management hacks, tips, and tricks
ā Dental marketing and SEO strategies that work
ā Financial planning and profitability for practice owners
ā Building and leading high-performing dental teams
ā Industry trends: DSOs, technology, and the future of dentistry
Mike and Paula bring practical wisdom from consulting hundreds of dentists through Next Level Consultants. Their approach? Customized strategies for your unique market and goalsāno cookie-cutter packages.
Join our growing community of dental practice owners and entrepreneurs. Watch live on YouTube and ask questions directly, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
New episodes weekly. No scripts. Just real talk about running a successful dental practice.
Visit: www.nxlevelconsultants.com/resources/podcast
Rate the show 5 stars and help other dentists discover us! āāāāā
I guess.
Welcome to Dental Unscripted.
Where Mike Dinsio and Paula Quinn break
down the practice ownership journey,
one episode at a time.
Starting up, buying,
and running a successful dental practice.
What up?
What up, guys?
Welcome back to another episode of Dental
Unscripted.
My name is Mike Dinsio.
We also have Paula Quinn on the program
today,
and we are continuing Shark Bite Week
Episode Two,
and we're super excited to have a friend
in our little sphere of influence who
I think is kind of one of these
guys that knows all things about tech and
AI and all the things.
But we're going to just get into his
head today.
But yeah, well, good morning, Paula.
How are you doing?
I'm great.
How are you?
I'm good.
I got my chocolate chip bar.
I've got a week and a day of
podcasts today.
So I've got the water.
I've got all the things.
We're going to be streaming all day today.
I just can't see night oats.
These are kind of my thing.
Night oats.
Well...
and adrian just got some mushroom mushroom
coffee oh that's good that's good well
welcome to the show adrian actually uh
now's a good time to introduce you uh
the ceo of my social practice um we're
super excited to have you buddy tell us
a little bit about my social practice and
um
you know a little bit about what you
do on a day-to-day introduce yourself to
the to the all right the audience yeah
let me look at my script here love
it do it can i use my script
am i not allowed you're literally allowed
well we're gonna we're just gonna scrape
her through chat gpt afterwards so just go
ahead and read that and
All right, cool.
Well, I appreciate that.
Thanks for inviting me on.
You guys are awesome.
So we've been we got started in two
thousand and nine.
as a social media dental company,
you know, dental marketing company.
That's why we call them.
I don't remember that.
You just had, didn't you?
Yeah, man.
Like literally.
The signs, remember the signs?
The signs were a hit, you know, so.
All the things.
Anyway, so, but over the years,
that kind of took, we got in really,
really early.
I mean, nobody was else,
nobody else was out there doing social
media for dentists, so.
But that's, I kind of took off.
He rode the wave of social media in
the early, well, two thousand nine, ten,
eleven, twelve.
And then we just started getting asked to
do other marketing services by our
clients.
So we did website development.
We added that.
We started in reputation management.
digital ad, you know, advertising, SEO,
blah, blah, blah.
We do all the digital marketing.
So our name really doesn't represent us
very well because it's kind of a social
media ask name.
You should probably change your name.
Once you figure that out after the
program.
Changing our name.
Oh gosh.
Your project.
And we didn't never, we never changed it.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a,
it's a mind.
It's like changing a child's name,
like halfway through the life, you know,
it's like so hard.
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
But we think,
we think of you as like, you know,
especially on your podcast,
which what's it called again?
Bite-sized.
Bite-sized.
So it's perfect.
It's Shark Bite Week.
B-Y.
Yours is bite, like bite.
No.
Mine's bite, like digital bite.
So we usually do, every year,
Michael does Shark Week.
And...
This year, we wanted to,
in addition to Shark Week,
we wanted to do AI.
This is our tech week,
so it's Shark Week.
It's fitting having you on here.
Again, this week's all about tech, AI,
and how it's affecting the dental
industry.
We're doing a whole week.
This is episode two.
First episode was with Tim.
Folks, if you missed that,
go back and watch it.
um you were on it paula so tim
tim tim uh tim kind of broke down
what is ai like how does it work
Tim kind of broke down what is AI,
how does it look,
how is it going to impact all industries,
just kind of like a global outlook on
all AI.
And this is the first episode that we're
getting into on AI.
dental specific because we live in the
world of dental and uh Tim has this
huge background on AI in general and so
that was a good one to start off
with but today's episode and and the rest
of the episodes are going to be all
about how AI and tech is really affecting
our little industry in dental and um we're
happy to have you on man so
Without further ado, I mean, Paula,
why don't you kind of tee up what
you were thinking with Adrian and Annie
and all the things that they're doing and
why you think it might make sense.
Actually,
it actually might make sense for Adrian to
let us know about how you guys are
playing with AI and Annie and all the
different things.
I'll start because I'll tell you why I
wanted him on here.
I mean, like he just said,
there's lots of things they do,
so it's not the only thing they're known
for.
but what really attracted me um to them
more recently is you know we're constantly
getting by our by our clients you know
all things startup practice management
acquisition of who do we you know what
how do we get the phone answered
especially our startups you know how do we
get the phone answered
or do we bring on a new, uh,
second person?
So then we started talking about
outsourcing and we did, uh,
an episode on outsourcing and this was
just in general,
or maybe we even did a webinar.
I don't know what we did on that.
Um,
and I thought what better than having
something that's available, um, you know,
we, we either have to pay a teammate,
you know, if they,
if they take the phone home, it's like,
you know, no offense,
are they really going to answer it?
You know, um,
you know, when they're even in the office,
they're getting up and doing things or
they're already on the phone.
So there was that aspect of it.
Then there's, you know,
increasing overhead with payroll is a big
deal.
And I love that with Annie, you know,
and you can dive into this, Adrian,
because I'm going to give it a very
broad, like not to do her justice,
but
See, you train her, she learns.
And so I know with me,
you and I had talked about if I
did it,
I could teach it how verbally I say
things.
If somebody wants to cancel or if
somebody,
how much lost or things like that.
So I thought it was very cool.
Number one,
she could be there all the time.
not to mention and you can talk about
that you know not just answering the phone
the other things that i know she can
do and then you know you you can
cut costs by having you know the person
available and train them you know um
people get grumpy by the end of the
day the end of the week um they
get annoyed by certain conversations they
don't even know how to answer sometimes
you know uh how much is a crown
you know but if you can
take some time and, and teach her this,
which she probably already knows the
answer to that one.
But, um, you know, I,
I just think it's a really cool option,
so you can dive,
you can take it from there.
Okay.
No, I appreciate that.
So that's a good overview of like thoughts
and ideas about, um, Annie.
Um, let me,
let me back up a little bit and
tell you why we even did this.
Okay.
Is that cool?
Let's give you a little background.
so you know we're a marketing company
we're hired to put butts in seats we
don't put butts in seats we get fired
yeah right we get fired well that's what's
supposed to happen so so when you when
you when you look at all of the
marketing stuff that you can do for dental
practice right a dental practice can run
ads they can do referral programs they can
do
social media, SEO, you know, whatever,
you know, anything, reputation management,
ranking higher in Google maps, whatever,
all the ideas to be found,
all the things, right.
What happens is, um,
if you're doing all of that,
you're driving traffic to sometimes the
website or the Google business profile or
whatever it might be.
And, um,
We know that two-thirds of consumers do
not want to make phone calls.
They want to chat.
They would rather chat than make a phone
call.
All of the weird generations below my
generation, that includes Paula,
don't want to make a phone call.
They prioritize their time.
They don't want to waste time on a
phone call.
They want to chat.
So I did all this research.
This is back in twenty nineteen.
I did all this research.
I looked at like two thousand dental
practice websites.
The average dental practice web or the
percentage of practices that had web chat
on their website was like less than ten
percent or something like that.
Right.
And all of them,
almost all of them weren't chapped.
They were like you'd click on the little
chat button in the bottom right hand
corner of the site and up would come
a form.
They weren't even chat.
They were masquerading as chat.
And this is two thousand nineteen.
This is two thousand nineteen.
So chat is supposed to be immediate on
demand support.
That's what the expectation is.
If Paula goes to a website and she
clicks on chat
If she gets a tree,
a choice of a tree choice, you know,
or a phone tree type thing, she's like,
this is not chat.
I want to talk to somebody.
I want to answer my question right now.
Right.
So in the dental industry of the ten
percent of practices that actually had a
is there a cat?
Michael, is there a cat there?
Oh, my gosh, there's a cat.
OK, not in my house.
She's trying to push this off on me.
It's definitely her cat.
Sorry.
It just threw me off.
I heard a cat.
Adrian,
you're literally pissing off Recy right
now.
I had this super solid train of thought
and then a cat came in and jumbled
up my brain.
Adrian,
do you have cats in your brain right
now?
pretty much.
Oh my gosh.
So anyway, all right.
So, so anyway,
all these chat things that these practice
said, like they weren't even chat.
They were just a form,
like the same form they have on their
website, on their contact us page.
So I'm like, ah, this is it, man.
We can get more people to schedule if
we just add chat.
the websites okay yeah so we added chat
and it was a real functioning chat it
was like you go somebody patient goes
there they type in the chat it pings
the office somebody in the office responds
it was what chat should be yeah we
put it on a few dozen practices and
um every single practice called us back
and said take this damn thing off our
website we can't handle all the chats
Oh, I can't wait to hear why.
Just that?
They can't handle it?
It's super intrusive.
Like, think about it.
You got a front desk.
People are having conversations.
Yeah, they're talking to a patient.
They're on the phone.
Well, they do that all day long.
They're texting on their cell phones,
though.
I don't know, Paula,
you need to freaking figure out how to
solve the problem.
Okay.
Like every practice, like, no,
we can't handle it.
It's too intrusive.
And because the chat should be an
immediate on-demand support,
if you don't respond,
it's a bad experience for the patient,
right?
So they're like, just remove it.
We can't manage it.
It wasn't the response that I thought we
were going to get.
So what we decided is like, oh,
let's think about how we can solve this
problem.
Do we hire a bunch of.
Forty year old men that are still living
with their moms in their basement to
manage chat or outsource to the
Philippines and get live chat like the
human beings doing it.
Do we, you know.
I'm up with, I don't know.
There was a bunch of things we were
thinking about.
We just said, let's just kill the project.
I don't want,
we don't want to manage four year old
men living in their mom's basements,
managing chat.
So we just killed the project.
So then when chat GBT came out,
I was like, oh my gosh,
this is it.
Like if we could train chat GBT and
we could ice, this is a November,
we could isolate the framework of chat GBT
so that it was a front desk receptionist
and it understood everything about the
practice.
Then, um,
We've there's no there's no bandwidth
issue.
There's no problem with the team because
the agent can like carry on a
conversation.
And then if you could do other things
like linking it to your practice
management system so it could actually
schedule or reschedule or take a payment
or whatever it might be,
then this becomes like an extension of
your team.
You just extend your operating dollars.
at a fraction of the cost of hiring
a new employee.
And it frees up the bandwidth and it
provides a better experience for the
patient.
So that's where we went with it.
And so we launched that about a year
and a half ago.
And it's freaking awesome.
Chat is so easy to set up a
really, really good chat.
And we built it from the ground up.
We didn't like white label some others
chat system out there because we knew that
the long,
the viability long-term of this product in
the dental industry is gonna be super
nuanced.
one practice is going to want to manage
their schedule this way.
And if the agent's tied to scheduling,
you're going to have to build a framework
so that it schedules correctly for this
particular practice.
Right.
Or one to your point, Paula,
one practice might want to handle the how
much is a crown cost
this way and one might want to handle
it this way right yeah so tell them
the price don't tell them the price dodge
the question and ask a follow-up question
you know there's all of a sudden you
get into like sales skills and all this
kind of stuff right
he wanted to build in a sales framework
so that we could build in you know
coaching like what you guys do like if
you go to a practice you're training a
front desk staff member you have a
scripting style right we wanted to have
the ability that the agent could inject
that scripting style or that sales
framework into a particular agent for one
practice right so we built all that and
then we it just awesome and then we
tied it to a voice and we tied
it to a phone number so now i
can pick up calls
okay and to the point of what we
were trying to accomplish which is like
how do we get a higher conversion rate
on all this marketing that we're doing
also we fell with this product we just
kind of fell into the holy cow we
can solve the missed calls problem which
is like a third of phone calls go
missed in a dental practice
which is unbelievable.
Yeah,
that is the statistic that a third of
all, I mean, it's insane when, you know,
you guys as marketing companies get,
like you said in the beginning of the
episode,
get so judged and threatened to be
dropped, right?
because you're not doing your job.
But then on the other hand,
the office is not doing their job either.
And if they did pick up the phone,
what's the conversion rate?
That's another statistic that's super fun
to talk about.
By the time the funnel goes all the
way down, it's like,
how many did you actually convert?
You missed a third of them and then
someone asked how much is a crown and
you didn't answer that right and you lose
the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And I'll tell you, I feel your pain,
okay?
I have trained in previous life.
I train salespeople, right?
So I had a deep background in telesales,
right?
Training somebody to say things properly,
lead conversations,
ask the right questions.
It's like the hardest thing to do.
It is so, so finesse.
There's so much technical specificity in
listening and asking and leading the
conversation.
One word changes the whole thing, right?
It just changes the whole thing.
So going into a practice and train that
front desk to not freaking screw up and
answer and get bulldogged by the patient
who just wants a price rather than
managing the conversation properly.
Dude, that is like,
there's so much money left on the table
in a dental practice.
It's like, it's got to be ridiculous.
Because dental practices,
they don't hire salespeople to answer the
phone.
They hire the twenty two year old.
college student who's never had any sales
experience.
They don't know how to build
relationships.
They don't know how to build trust.
They have to hire for experience usually.
I mean, they themselves,
we talk about all the time with Dennis,
they're not business people either.
So they're trying to service people.
They're trying to do a service.
They don't realize all this other stuff.
It's a business.
And
You got to have salespeople as your front
office,
salespeople as your treatment coordinator,
you know, stuff like that.
So they don't get that.
They're like, oh,
Paula's worked in the industry for ten
years.
She's worked up front before.
Perfect.
You know,
it doesn't matter what I can do or
not do.
The whole point of that is that you
can actually train A.I.
to like stick to the freaking script.
Well, okay.
So there's the crescendo, right?
So,
so we have human beings doing a job.
Oftentimes those,
those same human beings are making less.
Paul and I talk about this a lot,
making less than what you could make at
Wendy's serving French.
No training, no CE front office.
People don't get CE like hygienist,
dental assistants, doctors.
No CE, no training.
They learned what they learned from Greta
from sixteen years ago.
Right.
That's that's what we're dealing with
here.
Yeah.
A French fry worker that got trained by
Greta seventeen hundred years ago.
Wait,
I'm going to give him a little credit
because what I'm going to say, too, is,
though,
it is hard when you have your you're
off guard.
Right.
Like someone calls and, you know,
they say, oh,
I'd like to make an appointment.
OK, what for?
Oh, a crown.
Like how much does a crown cost?
You know, you do.
I do hear people freeze.
It's kind of like, do I?
How do I handle this?
That's why it has to be a skill.
It can't just be a script because people
ask me all the time to write scripts
for them.
Well,
the problem is that the next question from
the patient is completely different.
now you're screwed it's gone you have to
memorize you have to memorize like three
or four multiple through lines yeah it
just it's got a flow you can't just
be like oh what's the next you know
it's not like my computer won't turn on
did you unplug it and plug it back
in you know yeah and i'm not saying
you know i'm not
Of course, I'm making a point.
I tend to push on the furthest end
of that.
Just in case Greta's listening,
I wanted to bring that up.
Yeah, I know.
There's some amazing front office people.
We love you, Greta.
We love you, Greta.
Greta's amazing.
You know, it's just, quite frankly,
they are set up to fail.
Let's just put it that way.
They're set up to fail.
That's the appropriate way of saying it.
I have a question for Adrienne about...
Annie and teaching her.
So I'm assuming she comes pretty well
equipped with just everyday knowledge.
Or do you have to start from ground
zero with each practice?
No,
what we've basically done is we've taken
we built her on top of chat GPT.
So the the conversational capabilities,
the the being able to understand human
language is the same engine that drives
chat GPT.
So you take that or you use that
as its brain.
Okay.
But then what you do is you give
it a layer.
You give her,
it's weird because it's an AI and you
call her a her.
It's kind of freaking weird.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe we should just stick to the they,
them, you know,
so that we don't know what it is
exactly.
That was not a jab on the LGBTQ
because I love it.
No, that's actually smart.
I like it.
But we, they, Annie says they.
Well, you say Annie, so I...
Yeah.
Anyway, that was a stupid joke,
but here we go.
So, um,
So there's a layer that is a generalized
front desk receptionist in the dental
industry layer.
Here's who you are, right?
These are the types of words that you
use.
This is the base information that you
know, and this is dentistry-wide, okay?
You're a GP front desk office
receptionist.
You're an orthodontic front desk
receptionist.
you know, person, you're an endo,
whatever.
So you have they have these base layer
agents that just like this is your
identity.
Okay.
Then you put another layer on top of
it.
That is everything about the practice,
like ten thousand pages of whatever you
want.
You put it all in there.
Okay.
History.
Yeah.
Like the hours, the name.
Hours, insurances they do or don't take,
you know, the history of the practice,
how to find the practice if you're lost.
Right.
Do you have a do you have a
guide?
Because to come up with all of that
is probably difficult.
Right.
Well,
usually what happens is when we do the
onboarding process.
We'll do an interview with the practice.
We'll record the transcript in the
interview.
We'll inject the interview in.
So there's an asset that it can look.
And you're asking me all that in that
interview?
Like what's the name of your practice?
Yeah, we gather all the kind of the,
we confirm all the details about the
practice, phone number, website,
all that kind of stuff.
But we're also getting like tone
sentiment.
What do you want to be known for?
You know,
how do you want to be perceived in
the industry?
You know,
what are the what are your value?
What's your value proposition?
If they know what that is,
we'll explain it and come up with one.
But then we're taking everything in the
website.
We're injecting it.
We're taking other their insurance.
If they are in network,
then we're taking all of their insurance
documents.
We're injecting all the insurance
documents in.
So and then
And that's kind of yeah,
it takes it takes about a week to
get it like built out.
Right.
Well, once we've done that,
then what we do is we build up.
So we've got the base layer,
we've got the layer for the practice.
And then what we do is we we
set up a development.
uh a development site where we can test
it okay and this is really where the
genius comes in so you go to this
it's a little web chat it's like a
little web chat you can just ask it
questions and see how it responds this is
before it goes live
I called her one day when you gave
me it.
Oh, did you?
I had some fun.
Did you guys record that?
Did you get to go back?
Yeah, I've got it recorded.
It's recorded somewhere.
I could go find it.
Anyway,
you probably asked it some bad questions,
didn't you?
i tried she's very polite but when you're
when you're dialoguing and she messes up
that's an opportunity and this is amazing
ai is no you did that wrong learn
from this yes yes you're just basically
tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and the
more you do the better she gets
And she always remembers.
And so you don't have to retrain.
And then you just, so you're,
all you're doing is like the, the,
the practices I've had, like, you know,
we've got a couple hundred practices that,
that are using Annie.
Right.
So we've had about a year of time
to kind of developer and whatnot.
And I've had maybe two or three practices
canceled, like very, very few.
And the reason they canceled all in all
the situations, almost all of them,
I think they,
maybe one of them, maybe not,
is they wanted to go live very fast
and they didn't want to tweak and train.
And so the agent screws up one
conversation because they didn't test it.
And then they're like, yeah,
this is stupid, I'm done.
I don't wanna risk the reputation of my
practice with this stupid AI thing.
So we force the practices to some degree
to go through a long kind of process
of iteration before you go live.
So you don't screw up.
So that's how you do it.
And so that's when the team is like,
how much is the crown?
Yeah.
So then we're going to sales frameworks,
all that kind of stuff.
Like for a client like you, for you,
right?
If you had a script,
here's how you handle,
do you accept my insurance?
If you had that script written,
we would inject that in there and they
would use it.
Right.
Here's kind of like a tree.
If the patient doesn't respond this way,
but they respond this way,
here's how you respond to that question.
That's injected in there.
And then the AI is just so freaking
good.
It just knows how to use all that
information and weave it into the
conversation.
Right.
And then it's really just kind of pointing
it left or right if you see a
conversation that didn't go exactly like
you want it to.
so like would you consider this like
version one or like version three this is
like this is version two for us so
we have a v two we're coming out
with a v two point five in the
next
couple of weeks.
So it's super early development stuff.
It's like I tell I tell my clients,
like, look,
like this is wave one across the board
and all these different things.
And it's it's really never going to be
one hundred percent on wave one.
Right.
And so do you want to be the
first guy, you know,
the guy that waits a couple of versions,
whatever.
But like
So it's answering everything exactly the
way you want it to,
but does it sound like a real person?
Does it have the pauses?
Does, you know,
it's probably not quite there yet.
I mean, where do you see this going?
No, you can still, I mean,
the voices from just a year ago to
now are,
it's unbelievable how good they've gotten.
Wow.
You can still kind of tell that it's
an AI agent.
I mean, there's still some time.
I mean, they're so good, though.
You have to listen to it and kind
of like really kind of zone in on
it.
But you could kind of still have some
hollowness sometimes.
Sometimes the delay in their responses are
a little too long or a little too
short.
They answer too quick or too slow.
They sometimes will maybe repeat some
information,
like they might repeat the patient's name
multiple times.
It's odd for a human to repeat their
name.
Oh, thank you, Michael.
Thank you, Paula.
And then the next comment, by the way,
Michael, they're saying the name too much.
That's finessing and trying to figure out
how to get the agent to sound more
and more human-like.
But that's not...
I think that that's not...
That's not the goal of AI agents.
I don't think the agent's goal is to
become so human that you can't tell the
difference because I don't think that you
should.
I mean, we tell all of our clients,
you announce to the patient that it's AI.
You should do that.
There's no reason to try and trick them
into thinking this is a real person.
There's no benefit to it.
And there's really no disadvantage to
announcing that it's an AI because
you know,
if it does a good job and it
solves the problem and answers the
question for the patient,
then who cares if it's a human or
not, right?
Now,
can the patient bail on it as soon
as they want?
Yeah, you can hang up.
Well, how do you get to a person?
Because that's the most frustrating thing.
Let's say I'm a patient and you announce
that you're AI.
I'm like, okay, I'm in it.
I need to talk to somebody.
I'm with a freaking robot right now.
That's what the patient's thinking.
They're already salty.
Then they ask a question.
Okay.
And the answer is wrong.
Or whatever.
Now I'm pissed.
So,
so I'm a Zenny or even younger and
I'm like, fuck this.
Like I'm over it already.
Like you can say the F word on
this podcast.
It's called unscripted.
Holy cow.
I could have done so many efforts already.
Uncensored as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, but, but like, can I,
Can I bail on it quickly?
Because that can escalate quick when I'm
talking about it.
Are you with me?
Yeah, I'm with you.
All right.
So I'm going to answer the question.
Let's get really specific.
Are you calling during working hours?
uh yeah okay so you're calling during the
day during working yeah because i would i
would have a little bit more forgiveness
after hours all right so you're calling
during the day so what you would do
here is when you set up the agent
um you can set it up to pick
up all phone calls you can set up
to only pick up calls that go to
there it wouldn't have gone to voicemail
however you want to do it two three
things yeah let's say that it's these are
calls that are potentially go to voicemail
the agent picks up agent picks up and
says
Hi, this is Annie.
I'm the practice's AI assistant.
How can I help you?
You're pissed.
You have a question.
You need to talk to a real person
or something like that.
OK,
so there's a few things that you can
do.
One, you know that the team's busy.
Assumed the team is busy because the call
wasn't answered in the first place.
OK, they're either at lunch.
They're super, super busy,
whatever that might be.
So if you tell the agent,
because the agent can forward the call
back to the,
they can just bring the office back and
then forward the call.
They can do that, okay?
But you don't wanna do that if they're
not freaking there, right?
so you would have you would train the
agent to say something like so if you
if you say i need to talk to
somebody at the office you're not
answering my question the agent
recognizing the the the tone as as well
as like what you're saying wow could have
a protocol that says something like i am
so sorry that uh i'm unable to answer
your question unfortunately the team
asked me to pick the call up or
had me pick the call up because they're
at lunch or they're busy,
but I can send them a text.
I can give them your information and the
question and they will call you right
back.
Oh, beautiful.
Okay.
So you solve it that way.
So you just, that's why this is,
that's why like that particular situation
where, um,
you know, you're texting,
you're understanding,
like you're working in a dental practice,
they might be at lunch,
they might be busy.
How do you, and the politeness.
And that's why this is so like,
freaking cool because,
because it gets the narrower you get in
terms of like what the agent,
who the agent is,
the better the product becomes.
It's deep,
it's narrow and deep rather than broad and
wide.
They're like, if you go online,
you can find at least, I don't know,
a hundred and twenty five thousand
different AI agents that you can buy.
Now they're freaking everywhere, right?
There's just so many of them because you
can set them up so quick,
but they're broad.
yeah and they don't have they don't have
that narrowness so i'm i'm like a date
a data like i i understand by you
know facts and reason kind of thing right
so i was just having this conversation
with a client of mine i'm like you
know i i went to marketing school and
i thought it was all marketing but it
was all statistics and i hated that
because you know you do all this stuff
and then you get a track and see
if it works that's that's marketing and
Like, oh,
let's try that and then track it.
And oh, that's definitely not cool.
Right.
Right.
So early success.
You've put this on.
Do you have any before or after?
I'm putting you on the spot.
You might not.
but do you have wins to talk about?
Oh yeah, totally.
No, no.
So like what, what's that look like?
Like I was an office that missed,
like I'm thinking DSO is probably,
we went into a DSO once we snooped
around us in California.
Remember that we were a hot mess and
they missed on average a hundred calls a
day.
Like it was insanity how many calls they
were missing.
This was pre COVID and,
So, like,
someone that was just absolute garbage and
then put Annie on and, like,
schedule busy.
Like,
do you have some early success stories?
I actually have some specific case
studies,
but I don't have them prepared to show.
But I'll give you kind of a range
of what we're seeing.
So, average practices...
It doesn't matter if you're single
practice or DSO,
they're missing somewhere between seventy
five calls a month at the lower end
to two hundred and fifty at the higher
end.
So that's kind of the main bell curve.
Some are a couple, you know, one hundred,
two hundred,
two hundred fifty calls a month.
That's pretty typical.
We do have a few clients that are
missing more.
The agent picks up more than a thousand
calls a month,
which is just absolutely insane.
Yeah, it's crazy.
A thousand calls.
They just are so busy.
That's what they were missing before.
Oh, my God.
So of the calls that come in,
approximately seventy percent of the calls
are active patients and thirty percent are
new patients.
That's a pretty general break in terms of
like the types of wait.
How many were new?
So thirty percent.
Thirty percent.
That makes sense.
Right around thirty percent.
I heard the other way.
Perfect.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you're a practice,
you miss a couple hundred calls a month.
You've got right around sixty new patient
phone calls.
Now,
what what practices are using if they're
not using as they're using voicemail,
voicemail,
the statistics are really freaking strong
on this.
About eighty percent of people don't even
leave voicemail anymore.
That's seventy five, eighty percent.
Yeah.
Paula raises her hand again.
Right.
All right.
So I don't listen to it either.
Yeah.
Do the math.
You missed two hundred calls.
Thirty percent of them.
Sixty calls are new patient phone calls of
those.
Eighty percent.
I don't know what that number is.
Fifty.
Forty five.
Something like that.
Go to voicemail.
They don't leave a voicemail.
OK,
that's that's like a real like scenario of
a I would think is probably middle of
the row scenario.
kind of a practice.
All right, so that's the opportunity,
okay?
That's the opportunity.
Not even talking about the benefit of all
the calls that are answered by the active
patients at, you know,
during work hours or in the evening and
the AI is able to pick it up
and handle the call, right?
And maybe task the team to follow up
or whatever.
So there's the improved customer service
benefit, but just on the money,
So picking up those calls,
I see that the agent is able to
convert,
like go a full conversation on between
fifty to seventy percent of the calls.
So let's say you get fifty, fifty,
fifty phone calls.
Some of the calls,
the people hang up because they hear it's
AI and they're just like,
I'll call back later.
So it's not like one hundred percent.
It's like a silver bullet.
Right.
OK.
What are you smiling?
I raised my hand.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You hang up because it's an AI agent.
I'm out.
Right.
I'm going to use the chat.
Yeah.
You're using the chat on the website.
So anywhere between fifty to seventy
percent of those calls get there's a full
conversation.
And we've tied Annie right into the online
scheduling.
So it actually schedules and everything.
So I see.
On average, for the smaller practices,
now this is just generally speaking,
smaller practices,
ones that are missing seventy five to one
hundred calls a month,
I'm seeing between five to ten
appointments scheduled.
And actually showing up like we track the
whole thing through.
So that's scheduled.
They show up and they're presented a case.
And then we pull that revenue number back
in.
And I I'm seeing somewhere around five,
seven,
eight thousand dollars in additional
revenue every month.
That's on the lower end.
Those are busy offices, though.
We work with some small offices.
Is that average?
Well,
I was saying this is somebody that's
missing about seventy five to a hundred
calls a month.
So that might be bigger than like a
startup.
Right.
That somebody who's probably.
know doing a million dollars a year or
something like eight hundred thousand
dollars a year i mean that that's what
i don't have data on that that's what
bothers me when i'm coaching and i'm
talking to a marketing guy so it's a
great conversation like how many calls
they're missing well not only how many
calls they're missing but how many of
those are converting there's a few
services out there where
I can track calls coming in missed or
converted.
And that's the piece that I'm missing
because I always get the call.
I always get the email.
I need more patients.
It's like, I don't know what's broke here.
Is it the marketing company?
Is it Greta?
Is it you who can't sell treatment when
they actually do show up?
I don't know.
What's the benchmark?
And what's the benchmark, you know?
So when you say that many calls,
I'm thinking, shit,
that's a DSL pulling in a lot of
calls.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
On the,
let me just tell you on the upper
end though, that's not, that's not,
that's not like the lower end.
You know, I think I've looked,
I've looked at the,
so we're tracking all the,
all the conversations and the,
and the scheduled appointments,
the AI agent schedules and the revenue
generated from those patients.
The lowest I've seen is like three or
three thousand dollars in a month in new
revenue.
Okay.
Wow.
On the high end,
it's like sixty to sixty five thousand
dollars.
Wow.
It's in revenue from scheduled
appointments on the agent.
It's insane.
I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna,
that's a big practice.
That's like a three million dollar
practice.
You know what I mean?
So anyway, it's like there's, there's,
there's this money.
It's like money's just on the table.
Wow.
And nobody's picking it up.
It's like crazy, you know?
That's all right.
Okay.
So yeah, that's beautiful.
Just a tad real quick on, you know,
we, we talked for a minute.
We don't have to go deep into this
because we're,
we've been on here for a while,
but yeah, two minutes,
two minutes to answer whatever Paul is
going to ask real quick,
the chat and the outbound calls now that
it's doing for, cause I, you know,
one thing I will say is we,
as being consultants try every day to,
to get somebody to work.
I know unscheduled treatment,
I don't think you've tapped into yet,
but
Yeah.
Recare and unscheduled treatment.
Work the phones, baby.
Work the phones.
And we use dental Intel.
And I think you've seen it before.
They always have this pie of active
patients versus unscheduled.
And it's usually, usually, not always.
I have some offices that are bomb biggity.
It's usually about fifty percent,
I'm not going to lie,
of their total active patients for the
past eight months that don't have the next
appointment.
Yeah.
We could just get them on hygiene.
You get them back.
Holy cow.
So just real quick,
I guess you have two minutes.
I have like a minute and a half
now.
No, he said you have two minutes.
He didn't time me.
He didn't time me.
We're going live in fifteen minutes on the
next Shark Fight episode.
So we got to go.
But no, this is a beautiful question.
Okay, so here's the deal.
The agent initially was built to receive
calls,
but it did not have the capability to
call outbound.
So we built that in now.
We launched it about a month ago,
and we launched it specifically for
hygiene recare.
So what it'll do is it'll query the
patient management system.
It'll look for active patients who have
not been seen in whatever time frame
you've given that do not have a future
hygiene appointment.
And then it just calls and then texts
and calls and texts,
whatever framework you set up.
But it's just calling and it's scheduling
at about five to eight percent is its
conversion rate,
which I think is pretty damn.
We have statistics on this.
That's what that's probably.
I mean,
Paul looks at it more than I do
that.
That's probably average.
Yeah,
I think that's what we were estimating is
it's probably average.
And by the way,
it's better because no one does it.
No one's having to do it.
That's right.
And I think we may have missed that.
And I want to just reiterate,
it actually schedules into the PMS.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What?
Sorry.
And then the case acceptance module to be
able to read the case that was presented
that was not accepted.
That's what we're working on right now.
That's going to be a holy shit.
That's another level.
That's the next level right there.
I love that.
Well, that's exciting.
We'll have to bring you back on when
you've got some stats and some success on
that.
You know,
let's take maybe five minutes and wrap
this thing up.
This is the part of Shark Bike Week
where I'm just going to ask you, Adrian,
how do you see AI changing the dental
industry in the next decade?
Two years.
Two.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'll give you a couple things.
I'm going to go outside of just the
AI agents too.
Yeah.
Outside your realm, just in general.
Just in general?
Perspective.
All right.
We're going to see a consolidation of all
of the softwares that have been developed
for different functions.
And they're going to consolidate into
larger companies.
So you've got several companies that...
that do insurance verification with AI or
human in the loop with AI.
You've got diagnostic tools, Pearl,
Overjet, those kind of companies.
You've got agents like us.
You've got the voice and note taking
agents that upload conversations and
create tasks for the team.
All of these companies have jumped into
this game to develop really super
important tools,
but they're going to start
they're going to start consolidating and
they're already doing that.
If you buy Pearl,
you get a function in Pearl.
And I don't know exactly what the width
and breadth of this product is,
but they have insurance verification or
some portion of it.
But then you can go to eAssist,
you can go to other companies that have
an insurance verification with AI and
human in the loop kind of stuff.
Those are going to start to consolidate
because what's happening is doctors are
now, they get all the AI products,
they're spending three thousand dollars a
month and there's like
duplication of effort across the board
okay plus there's there's integration fees
for every single company so freaking henry
shine if they were using dentrix gets paid
like eight different times you know to
whatever anyway so those are going to
consolidate two voicemail is going to go
away the agents are going to get so
good at having conversations
on the phone,
it's using voicemails and ancient
technology.
Okay.
Three.
AI search, what we call GEO or AEO,
where they're putting Google Gemini,
the AI overviews at the top of search.
ChatGPT has picked up a lot of search
traffic.
It's going to completely revolutionize how
patients find you online.
That's a huge shift that we're right in
the middle of.
I couldn't agree more.
It's massive.
Someone found us once through ChatGPT.
They asked, like, who is that?
Who's the best consultant?
Yeah.
Is that funny?
It was amazing.
They said,
who's top ten dental consultants?
Okay,
which one would be better at whatever they
search?
I don't know why,
but another example of that is just a
couple weeks ago,
my dog was having a thing on the
weekend.
i did the normal google search and i
was frustrated with trying to figure that
one out i'm like screw it chat gbt
who's the best vet in my area that
can do um urgent care not emergency urgent
care gave me i don't like any of
these google star ratings give me better
okay but that one's emergency i just want
urgent care oh sorry yeah boom and i
called two and booked appointment
That's literally what you're talking
about, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Showing up an AI search and how to
do that is what we call GEO,
generative edge optimization.
It's kind of like the new SEO.
That's a big freaking deal.
It's a two trillion dollar business.
It's so massive.
And we're like really right in the middle
of it.
So doctors are going to have to figure
out how do I get referenced and sourced
As a citation or a reference inside the
AI responses.
You call that what?
It's called GEO,
generative engine optimization.
Yeah.
So that's it.
GEO.
Now we got to reverse GEO.
Just when we figured out Google,
we got it.
Now you got to do it again.
Oh, geez,
that's crazy how things are moving.
Well, Adrian, I have to say,
definitely was not disappointed.
We knew what we were getting.
Your brain is way bigger on this stuff
than ours.
So thanks for imparting that and being
part of Shark Bite.
Yeah, you're welcome.
And yeah, it was fun.
By the way,
my brain is just full of AI.
And movie lines.
And cats.
And college football.
And a little bit of cat.
Anything outside of that?
I'm an ignorant fool.
Just talk to my wife.
Yes, exactly.
On that note, I love it.
Thank you so much for being on today.
Thanks for coming on.
We appreciate it.
Take care, guys.
See you soon.
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