Ep. 65: AI, Branding & the Future of Dentistry with Sania

Part 10:00

This is Beyond the Arches, where full-arch dentistry meets real talk. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome to Beyond the Arches. I'm your host, Dr. Daniel Noorthoek. Today we have Sanya with us today. Sanya is a dentist and she has decided that practicing dentistry wasn't technically really for her and that she wanted to kind of expand and get a little bit different of her perspective in the industry and in the profession. And so she took some time off from that and has sort of recently been working into working with dentists to become influencers and maybe gain a better social media presence, working with AI and helping them develop that sort of marketing profile. And so she reached out to us and we decided to have a conversation together today where we can discuss and sort of kind of see where the conversation gets us. So thank you for being here, Sanya. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, we look forward to the conversation.

So why don't we, I'm actually going to let you, where would you like to start? You want to start with AI? Do you want to talk about social media, maybe a little bit of your background? Where would you like to start discussing things today? I can start with a little bit of my background just for the viewers to get some idea of why would a dentist ditch dentistry after spending years? I can think of a lot of reasons.

Yeah. No, but it's actually like I loved dentistry and people may want to stop practicing after spending a decade in dentistry. They might develop health problems, back problems. But I actually practiced just for two years. I didn't practice for too long. So I was starting to build rapport with my mentors, finding my path through it. And I found it really exciting. I was in the endodontic department. So every day felt like an adventure. What would the tooth look like once I dig into it, once I opened the pulp chamber? And I got to work with a lot of different patients, special needs, geriatric, everything. But the reason why I went into dentistry, I stood...

You know, changed my path and pivoted is because I noticed, other than the fact that I had a creative itch and I wanted to try other things, I also noticed that there were some dentists who, despite the fact that they were so skilled, were not able to attract as many patients. While there were dentists whose skills were a subpar, but they had this aura, they had this charisma that despite not speaking too much hearsay, they were able to attract patients.

So I was really curious about it. And I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. ▶I wanted to learn more about it. I knew this is not confidence. There's something more about it. What was the word exactly? I didn't know, but I knew it's not a skill you're born with. You can be trained in it. Now I know after working around 10 years in marketing and branding that that is a brand. Brand is basically what people, after having an interaction with you, what they feel and the perspective they have of you.

And so once I dived into copywriting and branding, I understood the importance for a dentist to truly embody their brand, to truly represent that. Because as dentists, we have this clinician's curse because we are trained in an environment that talks, that is built around quite competence. So how do we move that and have an aspect of self-promotion in it? And for me, how do I work with dentists? How do I work with dentists? How do I work with dentists? How do I work with dentists? And create a coherence in that branding between what patients see online and what they see in person is really interesting to me. So I went deep into it. And with AI, it's just sky is the limit.

Yeah. So as you go get sort of further and further away from your time in clinical dentistry, looking back on it, I read something this week that said, the further away you are from an experience, the more cherished you are. And less you remember of the bad parts and everything that you remember of the good parts becomes more and more prevalent. How has it changed as you've sort of become more and more removed from clinical dentistry? So that's an interesting statement, actually. And this is the reason why every six months to every year, I do think about going back into dentistry because that's still there. My knowledge is still there. And I'm like, should I try that? But then I see the impact.

I'm able to create. And I see how the world has opened up. And the interesting thing with AI is that dentistry and medicine is a field that AI is not going to take over anytime soon. I saw a video of a robotic arm that is doing a crown prep on a phantom head. Well, humans are very different from phantom heads. Humans tend to fidget and have phobias and have gag reflex. So AI is not going to take over that anytime soon.

So I do. I do miss that. I do. The fact that you're able to heal people with the will of God. That's that's a beautiful experience. So but I don't think that AI is going to it's only going to make things better for dentists, because something that I really miss and the reason why I went into entrepreneurship with creativity is because when you're practicing dentist, then that's all your life is, you, it's really hard to switch and do other things. It's and you will, you can talk about this more, because for me, life was just about practicing dentistry, patients coming back to family, I cannot do anything else, I cannot have any hobbies, unless I am extremely swift with my practice. And I've trained people better that I can take probably a day off, probably two weeks off. So it's really difficult. And I think this is the part, this is the part that I really miss. And I think it's really difficult. And I think it's I always have to think back about the fact that there's very less flexibility. That being said, if I was practicing now in 2026, would I still leave dentistry? Probably not. Because with AI, it's much easier for you to do so many different things. Within minutes, just give an hour of your time to improve your business, improve, have other hobbies on the side, create a content, create a personal brand, create consistent content.

Yeah, that's a that's very well said. It is an interesting landscape for sure. And there's a there's a an interesting part of it. As we were leading into this conversation, one thing I was thinking about was, you know, let's just take any random XYZ industry that we can see is going to get invaded and possibly replaced by AI. Let's just say like bookkeeping, right? When you when you're running your books on QuickBooks, a lot of what a bookkeeper does, and obviously they're skilled, and they have their own line of things that they do. But a lot of what they do is categorizing expenses, etc, things that are very trainable to a software or system. So a lot of those things will go away. And dentistry, like you've already kind of said, is a little bit more protected by that there isn't a lot that can happen from inside the patient's mouth. But there's ways to augment and build a practice.

around something that uses that as a diving board. So for for me, specifically, it's very, it's sort of an exciting time where that can augment as I continue to build and continue to brand done in one and continue to try to build, you know, beyond the arches, etc, that it's exciting that I know that that isn't going to get replaced and that there's something that's still there. But I can use it as a help and something. that will continue to help promote my platform and, and promote myself without me having to like really, you know, truly dive into it, etc. You know, dentistry is tough, because for a lot of patients, let's speak to patients that aren't or a dentist that aren't in or in more of like a traditional role. And in your traditional dental practice, and I think towards the periodontal practice that we purchased, that had been a 35 year standoff. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think that's a really good thing. I think that's I heard when we moved in, and we were sharing the space for a while was how little he spent on marketing and how frivolous he how little he spent on marketing and how frivolous he thought it was.

Because he survived, you know, the 35 years without it. Well, that's because that's that's the way it used to work. Now, what the what does that platform look like? Where, where does that person have to go? How does that person get away with not spending money, but still And maybe you can speak to that a little bit is, you know, how does that guy, how does that, you know, hang your shingle, if you will, you know, Dr. So-and-so at the front door and now you're open. How does that person start to build that brand and where does AI come into that?

Hmm. So I'd love to actually ask you the same question because your marketing and your branding is splendid. But I actually was asked the same question by a friend of mine recently. And she, she told me that I'm about to start working in a practice where I used to go to as a kid. And I had my orthodontic treatment done there and it inspired me to become a dentist. And the same practice now was bought by a much younger dentist.

And I'm going to start working there as an associate. And in that moment, and she said, you know, this dentist has hired a marketing agency and they've done, you know, they're spending money on that. And they're investing, I wouldn't say spending money, but investing money. And I just thought, I wish that marketing company would actually sit down with a dentist and ask their story, because the story this person just shared with me is gold. And just imagine someone who got treated there, got inspired.

To become a dentist. And now who's going to be treating other kids, the kind of inspiration and warmth they're going to feel when they're in that space and how they're going to treat patients is going to be much different from someone who's going to have a matter of fact or a textbook approach to dentistry. So this is, I think that especially in the world of AI where polished content is very easy to create. So what people are really looking for is the humanness.

Right. Right. Right. ▶And dentists, this has been the key since ages that people always wanted to see the behind the scenes, the warmth, the mindset that they bring to the practice. What are they actually like behind the scrubs and the white coat? So that's been a key factor, but it's now even more. This is why people who are, the more human they are, the more followers they get. And it's not just about being a follower or being an influencer.

It's about any time your content is being. Pushed by the algorithm, more people are coming to your page and the more they get to know about you. So really showing, creating a narrative with social media, you are able to tell your own story. So telling the story, telling how your smile transformation is different from the dentist next door. I recently had my kid treated by a pediatric dentist and it's a fun story. I'll actually tell you. I took them to be to a pediatric dentist and they treat.

They were nice. They were smiling. They knew I'm a dentist as well. So not the best patient to be, I was asking a bunch of questions, but they were very matter of fact, right? Textbooky approach treated us like we were another family and I just didn't like that. So I looked up another dentist, another pediatric dentist, and I found someone who's really, I couldn't find anything about them on their social media. Went ahead, tried them out and.

Absolutely. Absolutely brilliant pediatric dentist. So warm, so genuine, took their time to answer all of my questions. They understood that behind this dentist is a worried mom and I need to make sure that she's calm so her kids are calm. ▶The way they were speaking in the clinic with my kids, I wish I really, the marketing specialist in me wanted to take my phone out and record that content and put it on their social media because it was gold.

This is what people want to see. How are you actually with the patients? And so, so I think in this day and age, it's so much more important to show that because like I live in downtown and in just like a 15 minute walk, there are three to five dentists at just a 15 minute walk around me. So it's so much more different from the dentist that practiced back in the 90s. They didn't have this much crowd.

They didn't have to worry about creating a blue ocean for themselves. So what is going to make you different from the dentist who's five minutes away? And I'd love to actually ask you more about it. How do you have patients flying in to see you? Because for me, this is the approach I would take with clinicians. So what do you think? How do you have patients flying in to see you? Yeah, I mean, I think you've drawn a good portion of this, which is there's a level of everything that needs to be polished.

And there's a level of everything that needs to be social media and the behind the scenes and the story is very important to telling. Being transparent is what I would say is the number one thing that goes towards that. ▶So building a reliable brand that's built on something that's transparent that people have had good experience with and not messing with people's trust. And that can go in many different ways. Obviously, you've got to stand behind your work.

Number one. That's a level of trust that you have to gain within the community. But as you start to build out and bigger, you need to have a level of fidelity that is, here's my review, but I haven't messed with it. I haven't lured these people into it. And then they come through the process and they see, oh, well, they didn't lure me with dinner or a cookie for the review. Right. So there's in that level of transparency.

These are all things. Things, AI and social media, these are all jumping platforms, in my opinion. They're jumping platforms to show that transparency. But you have to not invade or not cause any distrust from that community. For example, our Facebook group is all just done in one patients. They discuss it. It's not anybody from admin. Nobody messes with it. Nobody alters any conversations. ▶It is a free, transparent place and community for them to have a discussion. What better place for a patient to go than see that and see, well, when I showed up, they said they were going to show up in a car that was marked with the Dun & One brand.

And they picked me up and they were nice people and they put me in a decent hotel.

Part 216:03

These things build and build on each other. So much like telling a story where it starts at the beginning and you build, this is what these tools. Allow you to do is continue to build on that platform. You know, we didn't, unlike some brands that may have really big backing, we're a very small, personally backed business and personally backed brand. And so we don't have these tools that say, you know what, there's a real big missing portion of travel dentistry inside the United States.

And we're going to, that's what we're going to exploit. We fell into it because we had other offices that weren't performing up to our standards that we were performing marketing. In Nashville, Houston, Tampa. I woke up one day, I decided to close them all down. I didn't like what was happening in those offices. I didn't feel the control that I have now as I start to build back out. And because of that marketing, somebody called in and said, well, I still want to see you guys.

Can I come in to town? And so we fell into that and we built part of our brand around that because we found that people aren't looking for anything but transparent. ▶Transparency, affordability, fairness, and somebody that they can trust. And so telling that story, to your point, becomes easier and easier as social media becomes more and more accessible. And I think that something that AI brings into it is a level of how much can we trust? How much can we put our faith in the fidelity of this content?

And so that can be something that we have to work against is, you know, others that may be exploiting the system. There's people in our area that do full arch that have 7,000 reviews. Actually, realistically, we'll call it 1,500 reviews. If you look at them, they all look pretty genuine. I get to sleep at night knowing that whatever we have now, 500, 400, whatever it is, is 100% somebody that I can shake my hand with, that I can say, yes, I did that.

And I don't ever have to worry about somebody going on to a different platform and saying that wasn't, you know, that that was falsified or that was AI filling those in. And so there's AI I see as this huge augmentation to what we do in creating that platform, but you can't falsify certain aspects of it. You can't falsify the different things that we've already discussed. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yes, exactly. And so like, sorry, you were saying?

Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, I would say that's the exact same thing. Okay. Yes. And it's changing so fast because six months ago, I used to, the clients that I used to work with, I used to stress on creating before and afters. And now AI can create before and afters without you having to even touch the tooth. And you're not even working on the patient and all these, you know, what is actually real from what's not. So that's absolutely true.

▶Then this is where the trust is built because you can say for a matter as a fact that this is all true. These are all patients. These are all patients that trust me. And these are all cases that I did. It's, it's so, um, there's, it's, it's a very interesting world dentistry is because there's so many dentists that are working in earnest and they want to have pride in their work and they're very particular and they're very type A, um, very OCD about getting things perfect, you know, a perfectionist.

But then there's also a big aspect of it and it's not even major corporations. There's, um, we've looked at, uh, buying an office and we looked at their marketing, you know, somewhat recently and their marketing claims that they, what they do is all in house and what they do is unique and different. And I know for a fact, cause I've seen behind the closed doors, nothing is right. And if that comes to light, then, then my profession, my, my, what I've built as a lab and, uh, my processes then get called into question.

Well, do you really have a lab? Well, yeah, I do. Do you have pictures? I have pictures, but you know, those things kind of contain the waters and that's sort of the, the world that we're trying to live, live in as well as overcoming the, the bad players, if you will, overcoming those that have come before us and misled the public. And that's true too, for anyone that has a bad experience with dentistry, you and I have very similar things where we went into dentistry over orthodontics.

And guess what? I didn't have a single bad, uh, experience with a dentist. And I would imagine that if you went in because of orthodontics, you probably didn't either. And we both became dentists. There's probably not a lot of them that a lot of, uh, dentists that went into the profession because they had a horrible experience as a child.

Part 320:59

Right? So those are the things that we have to fight through. And, and full arch is unique in that we have to fight through that every day because the number one thing that a person does not want to expose is. Vulnerability to that pain and vulnerability to something that they consider as ugly or that they're ashamed of. And we have to sort of overcome most of that in every single case that we do. So it's a very tough space to sort of market into when you really start to dig out those like specifics.

And, and as you really start to, um, gain a foothold in this, in this business, in this industry, specifically to full arch. Hmm. Yeah. Going forward. Um, why don't you tell me you're more on the AI side, the more the platform platform building, if you will. And then, um, why don't you give me your perspective in terms of, um, how and what kind of tools are helpful for building a person's brand and a person's entity and a person's, uh, presence, if you will.

And then I'll give more of my opinion because my opinion is actually a lot more, um, grounded in, in running the operations of a business with AI. Okay, sure. ▶So let's, so first building a personal brand is, has always been important and even more now, but there are different aspects. First of all, AI can make it a lot easier with content creation. Anything that can be repeatable and anything that requires your brand and your voice to repeat the results is something AI can do.

So whether it's creating a newsletter where you're educating the patients constantly, whether it's sharing cases, studies with patients, um, obviously with the approval of the patient, hiding the details of it, but other patients going to get inspired by, Hey, I came across a case like this. I just finished it up. They are very similar to what we talked about in our last consultation. So I wanted to share it with you. Here's how it progressed. Here are the results.

Um, and you create a template for it with AI. So AI is able to do that. Um, and, and there are multiple ways, uh, but what's very, very important and what a lot of dentists are not understanding is that in this day and age, people are going to AI to choose their dentists as well, to choose anything, whatever, even if it's a restaurant that they want to visit, they don't want to go to Google. I mean, Google has an AI aspect to it, but they don't want to go to Google and skim through all those searches and page one, page two.

No, they're going to go to AI. They're going to ask AI. It's very outcome focused. Now it, it, the way I worked six months ago, or even a month ago is very different from the way it works now. Um, it's understanding how you're working, what, where your mind works, what problems are facing. And so you can just say, Hey, I'm facing this problem and this too, uh, where should I go? And AI will get its results from what it sees online.

And so the more content you create online, the more in tune it is with your brand. The more patient testimonials it, uh, you have online and AI can even tell. And this is where your marketing is so beautiful because you have marketing from actual patients because AI can tell which testimonials are posted just by the dentist and which testimonials are posted by the patient, even if it's on your page. But these are actually branded by the patient themselves.

So hence you're more authentic than the dentist next door. Uh, and then, uh, how many patients you've done, how many testimonials you have, how many platforms you're, you're, uh, prominent on. So, uh, AI can pick up. Oh, I saw their results on LinkedIn. I have the results on Facebook, on Instagram, threads, TikTok. They're posting, they're educated because they're posting educational content as well. They have before and afters that seem authentic. And so now with all of these things, AI is going to rate you as a better dentist to go to for this patient.

And so the key now to have in mind for a dentist is not just to, uh, be prominent and just to show up everywhere. ▶The key is to be part of the results. When someone asks for an implant dentist, I want to be the one that AI recommends to them. So I think this is the reason why branding is even more important and to be present, to create consistent content in and, and create an omnipresence for you in as many platforms as possible.

Yeah. It's fascinating because what you're describing is sort of AI filtering out AI, the, the imposters that wants real genuine stuff, you know, it's sort of, sort of self filtering itself out, which is great because yet a, I'm going to go back for a second. So the way that I mainly use AI is in operations, more of the operations side currently. And the, the guy that I work with, um, is he, he is working into build us a backbone.

▶And that backbone goes from the very first interaction all the way through long-term warranty subscriber, how many offices visits they've gone to, how many different sets of teeth they were, how picky they were, how much our zirconia costs, how much our implants costs, how much patient contact time there is. Yeah. Yeah. It's a full backbone that can tell us everything between X, Y, and Z. And one thing that I've really pulled out of that conversation is that, um, the, the data is obviously the most important thing.

And the way you present and organize your data is the key to any of this working. That's how, that's how a computer is going to figure something out. Just like us. If we had three problems, the more documentation. Of each problem that we have, the better we're able to make the decision. Correct. So the, the data integrity and the way that it's organized is very, very important. So that ties into the, what you're saying, because if your data is on the internet and it's organized and it's authentic and it's real, that person should get more rewarded than the person that hasn't taken the time to organize any data or has just paid for their way.

I think it's very exciting because it's a, it's a chance for everyone to be on an equal platform. So long as you do the legwork to organize that data, you can be the one that's populated in the search results. Or in my example, the more and harder we work to organize our data from start to finish as an organization, um, we're able to find the different inefficiencies and the things that we're lacking on. I'll give you an example.

Anyone that runs a business, uh, looks through PNLs. And so as I look through my PNLs, I could tell that there was something. That was slipping through the cracks. I pointed out it, uh, um, my COO pointed out it, we were dead. Can we even set up a meeting to discuss said, you know, thorn in our side that we had decided it was well in order in this project to build this backbone, I had to build up sort of a fake one, which is a wild thing to even say that I can do that in this world of AI.

But I built sort of this fake with real data, but sort of this fake quarter sort of backbone to show. Yeah. These people, what I want built and how I want it to operate. And in that process, I found that the problem was not even remotely related to what we had all been convinced that it was. And that type of insight is something that is, you know, absolute gold to running a business efficiently and providing the, the, the quality of the process and providing the quality results that you want.

When we first started this, there was an issue with. the material that we used to put the teeth into it wasn't zirconia it was a nanoceramic is what it was called but we didn't have any real data we didn't have any real structured place to put this data and find out what is the profile of person that breaks these what is the average length what is what is the average lifespan of this when should we expect you know more people to come in because it's about time for them to be broken those kind of things but now we can ask it that now we can say here's our whole world we've organized it for you what do i need to do here and and what's very fascinating and cool is you can put different agents on each different task you know you can have a legal agent and a marketing agent and they're all sort of going to bat for themselves and and what their position is and reviewing and say well this isn't really legal so don't worry about it over there and it's a very exciting time and for people that are just getting into it that can be sort of an overwhelming world i mean we're in this backbone we're totally coming off of any frontier model we we have an agent that decides which ai platform to ask right what a crazy world to not even be on a a clod or a chat gpt but to have a world in which it says this seems like more of a chat gpt solution let's go here and to be able to sort of own that data is very important what i personally find is fascinating is and i generally don't have this conversation if you and i were just sitting next to each other in a bus or if you asked me if i used ai generally speaking i'm going to say yeah i use it because what i find is when i when i did start to get into it and start to bring it up on said bus or on the golf cart i find that it's ai is meant to please you and it can become a huge echo chamber and it can become a huge echo chamber and it can become a and what i have found with friends that own other businesses say it's a lawn care business or a health care business doesn't matter what it is they sort of pick a frontier model and that frontier model sort of convinces them that they're perfect at what they do and oh my goodness that's a wonderful idea and they go down this like sinkhole echo chamber and that's that's them using ai and i've had to sort of push myself to stay open to not committing to a program that's frontier platform and not committing to saying yes i know ai and sort of being open because it can kind of narrow you down into this little echo chamber that you're that you're amazing and so it's funny because we have this sheet that we have prepared for our discussion and i want to get your opinion on how does a person start an ai how does a person you know a person being a dentist how would you recommend a dentist start an ai and since i laid out said problem how do they avoid ending up in that echo chamber because like i said i've gotten to the point where i don't even discuss it because um everyone is convinced that they're right and that they're in the right echo chamber and that anyone else is just merely a suggestion um how does a person get into it not convince themselves that they're in this perfect world where they figured it all out and and stay open to what is out there yeah i that's first of all let me say for someone who's watching this podcast the the the phase where you are where you have agents battling each other that's a very high level so if someone who's listening for the first time whether they're a dentist or not is uh don't get intimidated by that um and it's that's not the first step at all so the thing when you're starting out for a dentist or not or if the patient who's watching and they're like i want to start using ai as well um first of all think big that is that that is the key because we are so uh we have a tunnel vision and we have a set things um a set mindset of where this is going to go two plus two is equals to four nothing else can happen but and but ai and all these ai models are not like a typewriter that it can only generate a specific set of results um ai did not come with a manual either that this is only as much as you can do

Part 433:44

with ai anthropic uh which is the company that has claude they have their own courses paid and unpaid versions of courses but they're also not telling you exactly what you can and cannot do so there's someone sitting out there who thought i wonder if i can create a website with ai i wonder if i can create an app with claude they decided to do that and now it's become mainstream everyone's doing it within a couple of hours having their own websites having their apps um linking uh their apps and websites i'm gonna interrupt you sorry real quick funny enough um my goddaughter i have two goddaughters they are little tiny mini entrepreneurs and anytime they get a dollar they go to like making things and so they make these like little braided rubber band um sort of like bracelets i forget what the thing is called they they were telling me all about last week they were telling me all about last week they were telling me all about last week we went out to dinner maybe like a week ago they were telling me all about how they were um they and their dad were going through and making a website together for their you know selling these products and it's just mind-blowing that seven and ten year olds are get the concept of like let's make a website i'm sorry to interrupt you but i had to throw that in there no no that that's that's so interesting that's the it's a very unpredictable world we're living in we don't know what's going to happen in 10 years um six months ago i created a course for dentists on how to use ai to create content with jack gpt and in a few weeks claude was launched and so the hype was all about claude and then chad gpt came back into the race with codex and now and i was teaching prompting and now ai can prompt itself so it's like that whole that course is still valid for someone who is a beginner and wants to really learn but for most people who are not going to be able to do that they're going to be able to do it they're already in the ai race they're like we don't need this this is primitive this is so last season so so for coming back to someone who's actually trying to get into the ai world and start wants to implement it for their practice just think big the key is not to limit yourselves to what you can do with ai and start with the chat whether it's chat gpt or it's claude chat um or it's gemini whichever ai model you're using the first step i would say is to get the paid version because if you're using an unpaid version you're always going to keep running out of credits and tokens um and i have from what i've researched if you're in an unpaid version they tend to use your content for training their own models uh so it's that you get some privacy with paid versions so get that and then it's not too much it's not too expensive and then start talking to ai get in the chat there's a great app that i use whisperflow i'm sure you've heard of it it is a voice yeah it's just it makes things so easy so if you're in your practice and you uh have a hesitation from a patient who is who don't who doesn't think that regular cleanings are important and once you once you have a few minutes to yourself you open up your phone open the chat and say hey i had this this issue today what can i do about it and then you can start talking to ai and start talking to them and then you can start talking to them and give as much context to claude as possible or chat gpd whichever version you're using um and then once it comes up with solutions open up a project so you're able to dive deep into it and so claude may come up with solutions like you know send them case studies here's what you need to do chair side with your chair side conversations here's what you need to send them here are the case studies that you need to do here's what you need to do in terms of marketing and so on and so forth and the more you're able to um experiment and learn with ai and then implement it it's all about implementing it and seeing and playing with it and finding your way through it um and not to get intimidated by it because i feel like if a dentist we're able to learn muscles of mastication and all the nerve innovations and about occlusion we're able to give a long block for a root canal in the wisdom tooth we can understand algorithm and ai so that's just what i want to say for a beginner i i agree fully it's uh it can be a daunting task and i i think that something that has always that has stuck with me from the very beginning was i have a friend who um always says it's like the first thing out of his mouth anytime ai comes up is today is the worst that ai will be in history ever again tomorrow it's better the next day it's better um and that that also is

Part 538:34

another little aspect you know psychologically it can be a little bit of a challenge but it can be sort of be intimidating to say okay i'm going to start today but uh just like you um writing that course in in um organizing and building with a chat gbt and then also you know fighting through that and and realizing that that has sort of become a thing of the past and archaic that can be sort of um you know that can be defeating for a person as they start to they go okay that it wants this and it's i'm going to create this portion of the course and i'm going to create this portion of my social media platform and then that portion gets sort of outdated it can be defeating because of the progress the progress can leapfrog anything that you've just done um so staying tenacious and staying resilient in the day and continuing on you know using it daily um there probably in the last year hasn't been a day where i've spent less than an hour on it a day of some sort and the difference is as you know from from last year to this year is it's like i'm not even using the same thing anymore it's it's it's absolutely unbelievable but um my encouragement for someone starting would be to stay tenacious and to not get defeated because it can be very easy so in terms of the word defeating um you know we have to have a positive mindset first of all and defeating in what sense so the first example i'm going to take my own example the course while i think for a beginner it's still quite valuable the course uh for a tech savvy person may be defeated but the knowledge is only growing and we're only the more we're able to experiment at a more you know simpler version of ai we're going to get better when it gets advanced and ai is learning like whatever model we have and use consistently it's it's becoming our business brain so it's only getting learned learning and getting advanced um recently i i was working on a project and i accidentally uh opened up a new chat window in claude and i was like oh my god i shouldn't have done this it's supposed to go in that project but i was working on my phone i was outside and so but it gave me the answers according to what i needed because it was able to fetch from all the other chats i've had which has never happened before it was such a new thing for me to see that it's able to get the memory from everything that i've had we've ever talked about from all the chats so it's only going to get better our knowledge is going to get increased and the more comfortable we are so our projects are whatever strategy we've created in terms of marketing whatever content we've created that is going to keep on changing as the world changes as ai gets more advanced but the more we get practice with it the the better we are going to get and if you were treat if you're doing something right now according to what ai has to offer according to what you're doing right now according to what you're doing what the world has right now it will generate results which is why there are high school dropouts that are becoming millionaires because they're using what ai has to offer right now there are people that were selling these prompt guides for like five hundred dollars for prompt guides and even though now ai can prompt itself they made a bunch of money from from when it was um when it needed prompting so so that's what i i feel like uh you know as dentists i think we become more and more aware of what we're doing and i think that's what i'm trying to do is that we become quite resilient we this is this is something we're trained for if it if it's so it's difficult you're met with a patient who might say oh this my treatment is going to pay for your next trip right and you have to brush it off and move on to the next patient and so i think resilience is is part of her job and um i'm pretty positive positive how dentists are going to take good words no doubt the um i think of it as well where my friends and i that i that i hang out with they're not dentists but um also entrepreneurs of some sort and we all sort of think of it as uh maybe not the next new you know frontier because it's very much the same sort of tools and and actions and things that we're very used to doing like running pnls and um you know trying to find efficiencies in the business and promote ourselves etc but it's it's maybe we don't go to the level of saying the new frontier but it's definitely uh a world in which we've now all become sort of on a loving level playing field to some sort there there is no super amount of money that you can necessarily pay that gets you this much further along they still have to go through that and prompt it the same way etc so we very much think of this as sort of an opportunity to play on a playing uh an even playing field and that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that should be exciting to anyone that's that's listening that that anyone that um wants to get into ai it's still fresh it's still new it's still something that you can use to your advantage to get to that frontier faster i think yeah yeah and the the defeating thing is it's 2026 ai is so easy to use and if there's a dentist out there who's still using stock content and generic images that's that's a defeating mind now you're not going to be able to get into that frontier you should feel defeated and if you've hired a marketing company and you're paying them ten thousand dollars a month and they're giving you stock content then that's something to think about again i mean i i've met the dentists and i've i've offered them that i can do this for you just try it out for a month and they say oh we have a dso that's handling our marketing and i say it doesn't i don't say it but i feel it doesn't look like it the least you can do as a marketing company is create ai slop even that's going to be better than generic content and stock content um so again for a beginner if you're really you know other than the fact that you want to get help with um the business side of things how to convince patients the chair side content creation is something that you can if there's a beginner dentist who wants to dive into ai they can definitely try to experiment with content get rid of the stock content the generic images get rid of the mother's day father's day posts and um and the 10 off posts and start uh talking more about the story behind it it doesn't even have to be um the pictures you're posting because i have a i have a content um it's a seven second clip of a dental office um i think i recorded back when i was practicing and i've used it multiple times a seven second clip with a different text on it with a different story with a different narrative and there are dentists i'm getting followers from it i'm getting over 5 000 views i went from 25 views to 5 000 views from it and um there are people saving a dentist saving and sharing it and i thought i was telling my husband like why would someone want to save this there this is this is their environment every second every single day why would they want to save and share it but it was it was the content the captions the story that was in there um so so this is i think for any dentist out there we this is not just the nice to have in 2026 this is essential this is the first step for you to create a brand online and to have a brand coherence between what patients see on in person to what they see online um or vice versa and just start posting pictures of yourself uh behind the scenes have your dental assistant take a picture of you have ai write a caption for you um don't post about patient john bringing you donuts and bringing a team donut instead because patient carla and patient maddie do not care about it uh what it really if you really must post pictures post a picture of you with their smile like this and then give a narrative of how that led to patient being happy and satisfied um so i i think that's and then talk with ai brainstorm with it and and revamp your your social media for that i think that's that's the first step we need to do i'm very glad to hear

Part 647:12

your opinion on stock photos because i think of myself as a very nice uh boss i'm not scary at all when when i go sit down next to any new employee they get a little bit nervous said listen i'm not the one you need to be scared of you know being around you it's it's other people that are are going to come after you not me um there are two ways to enrage me one um put uh signs around the office like do not open you know uh fridge gets cleaned out once a week i paper signs drive me bananas and number two is show me anything with stock photos you show me stock photos i'm going to lose my mind that's why i was laughing when you said stock photos yes exactly and i think it's it's shifting because now ai slop is everywhere you i i went to a festival recently and every food stall there had a banner that was generated the other day and i went through chat gbt and i was like i kept telling my husband that's chat gbt and he was like why don't you choose what you want to eat and i said yeah but that's chat gbt maybe they were spending more time on their recipes rather than uh than worrying about their branding yeah yeah so so it's it's becoming i think like in in a few i was going to say in a few years but i think in a few months that's going to be the new version of stock content but but for for the people who are working and want to try something now that's the least you can do and if you're not putting um don't go into creating um avatar versions of yourself i think that's another business that's up and running and it's thriving where people are saying we can create avatars of you because you don't have time to create your own content i think dentists are one of those professions where trust is super important so if there's an avatar version of you um that's that's that's a red flag for patients so um it's it's important if you don't have time to create content um have uh have someone create uh an animation uh through cloud design have someone create um you know a different kind of cartoonish video and educational content and have your audio in the background or have a behind the scenes of you working and you know explain through it so so that's just personally what i believe i couldn't agree with you more that's really true a lot of what is how we ended up with a podcast we had talked about it well before any sort of ai because um we felt like we had a story and some level of branding that we wanted to do that was very personal and very like long form if you will rather than just short 30 second um tv advertising yes i'm old enough to be tv advertising was the number one way even before google um but this was sort of we wanted to be able to have our own platform to generate long form content with not without a lot of uh extra polish and stuff so that patients could sort of get that sort of genuine feel um and that's that's something that's very important to building that brand is is having that genuine um story that's out there and and to finish the story of how we ended up really with a podcast is the final push was um me having a conversation with ai on what i what i should do and where my holes are etc in in terms of the business and it said listen the only thing that you can do that's better than anything in the world is genuinely put a ton of time into something that is you real 100 can't be stolen can't be generated you know my competitor can't steal my they can stay they could steal something or my opinion but they would have to create it themselves they'd have to make that again versus just taking a different shot angle or or stealing a stock photo of xyz so um we've really invested in trying to get that long form content that can't be artificially created as a result of a conversation i had with ai yes yes this is this is one of the reasons why i reached out to you because um i was so inspired i mean who brings their patience to their podcast but you had i mean if someone wants to know more about what it's like being treated by dr dan they just need to go on a podcast and patients are coming and explaining the entire experience and um and that was really interesting for me to see it's that's definitely very unique it's self-serving because if i look back on the year those are some of my my favorite moments of the year was spending that time with them after we've gotten through it all it's it's kind of like a post-game wrap-up after a sports game is you know you get to that level where you're now friends you know they're excited to see you you know we've tried to capture sort of different timelines from 48 hours after surgery or 40 hours after surgery all the way to three or four years after surgery and so we've tried to kind of capture different moments we had carry on uh he had a uh an implant

Part 752:31

fail that was a popular one because people want to know how does it how does it happen if you have an implant fail what's that world look like and so bringing all of that stuff on and getting that out of them has been really a fun fun exercise um pivoting a little bit i want to ask you give me an example and i'm putting you on the spot a little bit give me an example of i'm a let's say i'm a private practice i don't use uh ai yet i want to come to you and i want to build an ai sort of uh platform to build off of or i want to start building my brand can you give me an example of something that's like a really bad use of an implant fail that's a really bad use of an implant or something that's uh maybe popular out there that you don't think is is very good and then one of like a an excellent example of of what a person could do um so again in terms of things not to do with ai for dentists i would i would say um not to uh use ai avatars like this is i i'm like i talked about before uh trust building is very important so using hey gen or these kind of apps versions of you um and giving very robotic educational content even uh is a big no um and so if you if there's someone new and they want to use ai to just uh start from scratch and and go the thing that i've found really helpful is to build a dashboard with ai and with cloud and that's really simple um so what you have to do is you go on cloud and start a new project with uh first of all have the paid version have the desktop version of um so it's installed in your computer uh open it up go on project and i primarily use cloud so i'm going to give that example um and have cloud analyze your social media and where it is right now um and then give give your username give access to cloud the way i work with agents is uh or with projects is i call them my dependable agents i do not let them execute tasks themselves um they always have to i always have to screen the tasks and i always have to screen the tasks um and i always have to allow them for them to execute it so they they go and they do the competitor research they go on instagram they check out where you are uh in terms of followers in terms of posts what are other people doing in your niche um and they will come back within a few minutes with all of the data next you're going to ask cloud to create a dashboard of it so it's going to you can customize it as much as you want but cloud will say okay this is where you are and this is what you need to double down on this is what your competitors are doing um and it's going to create an entire content plan for you um on what's working and what's not working and what can work so um so that's i think a good first step to have um that being said uh just just something that i want to mention is that i did the same for my social media because i used to work for other dentists and build their brands and i did the same for my clients and somewhere down the line i i became sort of like a ghost writer i couldn't really put my name to the brand and i couldn't i said okay i'm going to start building in public and build my own personal brand and i started with a dashboard as well um and this is i would say around four months back so definitely ai is a lot more equipped now to handle dashboards um but what happened then was i kept coming back to certain posts that uh for example i have a post on my social media that i've been using for a long time and i've been using it for a long time and i've that is about um when i had wrote an article non-dental article and it got published it's a big deal got lots of views um it so it kept coming back oh that worked that worked and i had to kept training it and saying and it's and you have to be okay with training claude and whatever ai model you're using because it's like training an employee you hire an employee and you they don't do well the first day you're not going to fire them and say oh they don't work you need to keep coming back to them you need to understand that maybe they're not learning like this maybe they're a visual learner maybe i can add them on my slack channel maybe i can send them a loom video of what it work what works what doesn't work um maybe i give them a chart of the workflows so go back and forth with claude and what i felt was that it was giving me a list of things to do and list of content to create with what which which works to certain extent and didn't so i went rogue and i started doing my own research and experimenting and that helped me a lot so i think um that's while you're using ai it's important to first um be patient and then also have someone who is sort of helping you if you do not have time if you're practicing five days six days a week for someone to translate it but otherwise even if you're doing exactly what ai is telling you to do and then that becomes a schedules task so you can command claude to um run the same thing next week uh and every week at is going to run the dashboard again see where your followers are see where your competitors are doing um what i do and what i've done for myself is i've created separate projects for each platform so one is running linkedin one is running instagram one is running facebook um and i wanted to grow my linkedin i haven't touched it in a while so i it didn't just help me revamp it it started telling me which people i need to reach out to it started and i said i i don't have time to engage with posts it started recommending me the posts and what i need to comment on each post and i had to go back and forth and tell it okay these people are you know great they're big influencers so my comment is going to get uh buried under all those other comments so i want to find small businesses and dentists specifically or small ai influencers so it filtered to it and started giving me um you know posts that were relevant um so i'm going to go back and forth and tell it so i started commenting because at the end of the day i do get content fatigue and i my mind just comes up with great awesome words like that so it would give me three four line comments on you know here's what you can comment on um so so i have different and i i'm trying to replicate it for every client and so um it has these agents if if you call them i call them dependable agents um because i'm a you know sal khan who is the on academy said that you need to have ai write the email for you but you should be the one pressing send so i think that that's that's the way to go and uh once a dentist is this way through i'm sure they're going to figure it moving forward i love it that's uh that's actually a great um sort of stopping point i could talk to you all day about uh ai but i think that uh you know giving these like building blocks uh and advice to the listeners is very important and i think that's a great way to you know help them sort of getting get a starting point because there there really isn't a lot of places that they can come to sort of get where to begin and and how to start this project because it can be overwhelming and it can be like we talked about defeating yeah um but dentists are are tenacious so uh hopefully somebody will will find some value in the conversation that we just had no doubt um yeah and also not not to be a one one quick thing i want to mention for dentists out there is not to be excited when they see some new app that is launched some new shiny object out there because um the influencer world has changed a lot instead of just talking about brands they're talking about these new things that we can create with ai uh so just today i saw a video of a girl who had her makeup her blush and she used codex to take the mirror out and code and create it into a digital diary for a dentist you really need to do that not not necessarily you can create a digital diary you can create an app you can create your own version of smile fine smile whiz but do you really need to reinvent the wheel not necessarily so i think just just try to stick to the basics do as much as you do and i think i think we're going to be good yeah the at the end of the day what we have is a business that is primarily a relationship dependent and relationship driven uh and it's uh built on the hand skills that are very hard to replicate um there's aspects of it that we didn't have touched in the past in past episodes about how ai is there to augment us for digital design and other aspects of dentistry um but i think we did a good job to kind of talking a lot about like the social media aspect and sort of how it can be um it can help build us build us and build our brand um and kind of you know where to start and how to do things um if i'm a dentist or i'm

Part 861:35

somebody that's listening that wants to reach out to you to discuss anything um would you like to sort of uh plug how do i find you you know what are we going to talk about those kind of things yeah yeah sure i'm on instagram uh i'm most available over there to align with sanya um that's my username uh that's my handle on instagram aligned with sunny and then i am on you can reach me out on linkedin um and sanya khan.ai and then i'm also my my email address is there on my instagram i think yeah sanya at gmail.com is my email address and so yeah and reach me out through there amazing i'm i'm sure that we'll get a link put up on there and um this is actually the first time we've done a podcast with a zoom um a zoom meeting uh we have had one in the past but it was in the old studio this is actually the first zoom that we've ever done and it's gone smoothly smooth and flawlessly so uh i appreciate you being here for that of course you know i'm actually i have a flight to you us tomorrow i'm here in toronto so uh i was actually thinking maybe i could make it to your place but i'm traveling it's it's a big country i'm gonna be in texas so you're gonna be in texas yeah so i was thinking maybe i maybe some i could work something out but uh carly gave the option for zoom so like let's do it perfect yeah you're welcome anytime if travel does bring you down to south florida and um you know we've really appreciated getting to know you and uh i'm sure we'll use you in the future in terms of uh you know jumping on the podcast again there's like i said a million different conversations that we could have so um i really appreciate you taking the time to uh have the conversation with us and i look forward to the future with you as well thank you so much dr dan and you're such an inspiration i do want to say that most dentists stop after uh before and after photo shoot but you're taking it further and actually bringing dentists um onto your podcast this is huge for potential patients so thank you so much for what you're doing thank you thank you and thank you for having me yeah i appreciate it no we we uh we enjoyed having you uh if you enjoyed this content like subscribe uh email us if you have any questions uh i'm sure we'll have the link um to uh getting to contact and uh until next time we will see you soon thank you