Dental Marketing Theory - A Podcast by Gary Bird
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Dental Marketing Theory - A Podcast by Gary Bird
#217 Why Your Practice is Losing $100K a Year
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Dental practices are losing as much as $100,000 a year without even noticing. With 30–35% of calls going unanswered and most patients never leaving a voicemail, every missed call is a missed opportunity. What appears to be a simple front desk issue is actually a deeper system breakdown, one that’s draining marketing budgets and limiting growth.
In this episode, Adrian Lefler explains how AI chatbots and voice agents are changing the way practices handle patient communication. You’ll discover how leading offices are capturing missed and after-hours calls, boosting scheduling conversion rates to 70–80%, and automating follow-ups while maintaining a strong patient experience. The conversation covers what makes AI effective, from proper training and sales frameworks to handling objections, and how to implement it across calls, texts, and web channels while supporting your front desk team.
Hosted by Gary Bird of SMC, this episode delivers practical dental marketing insights alongside real operational strategies from Adrian Lefler, Founder of My Social Practice. If you want to increase conversions, eliminate revenue leaks, and modernize your systems, this is a must-watch.
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✨ Timestamps ✨
00:00 — Intro: AI in Dental Marketing
02:30 — Why Everyone Got Burned by AI
03:17 — The Real Problem: Missed Calls
05:38 — Wasted Marketing Spend Explained
07:10 — Why Voicemail Doesn’t Work Anymore
10:30 — What Changed: AI Is Now Working
12:00 — What Makes AI Actually Convert
15:12 — AI Agent vs Front Desk Performance
17:57 — Real Revenue Gains From AI
20:36 — How to Implement AI Correctly
23:40 — The Future of Dental Practices
25:07 — Understanding the Cost of AI
27:40 — AI vs. Human Receptionists
31:10 — The Future of Automated Patient Communication
34:15 — Technical Integration: API Read and Write
41:27 — The Risks of DIY AI Marketing (e.g., OpenClaw)
50:23 — Final Thoughts and Resources
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Website: https://mysocialpractice.com/
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Dental Marketing Theory gives dentists real strategies to grow smarter and scale faster. Hosted by Gary Bird, founder of SMC — recently recognized as the best dental marketing company — the show features candid conversations with top dental leaders about marketing, operations, and what’s actually working in today’s practices. If you want predictable, profitable growth, this is your podcast.
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If you missed thirty, thirty-five percent of your phone calls at your company, would you even be in business? No.
SPEAKER_00The average office is losing a hundred thousand dollars a year in treatment, and that's at fifteen hundred dollars a patient. That's not counting no shows because of schedule. That's just like basic phone skills. And AI literally, from my vantage point, like what we're tracking, it literally solved.
SPEAKER_02I can't see a dental practice without an AI receptionist agent or some kind of an AI voice agent in their practice in the next two or three years and staying competitive. The statistics are super strong. It's like 70, 80% of people don't need to be voice bells. They just call the next office.
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to another episode of Dental Marketing Theory. I'm your host, Gary Bird. I'm the owner of SMC National, where we help offices just like yours level the playing field against the big guys out there so you can grow the way that you want, but you can't grow if your AI agent is absolutely scaring away new patients. And today I have my friend, the one, the only, Adrian, who's from Social Practice, and he's going to be breaking down how he built his AI agent. And we're going to be taking notes and comparing. We have an AI agent as well, and we're going to talk about what you should be looking at when you are building out an AI agent. And at the end, we're going to talk about OpenClaw and if you can build out your whole own marketing system. This is really, really good at the end. Make sure you stick around for that. Stay tuned. All right, we are live for another episode. And today I got one of the OGs in dental marketing. He's been in dental marketing for a long time. If you can't tell, we both have gray beards. And I don't know if we both had gray beards when we started, uh, but Adrian is awesome. He we didn't. He's confirmed good. Yeah. All right. So he's been doing dental marketing for a long time, and he offers a lot of different services. And some of them are similar to the things that we offer, and some are totally different. But I really appreciate when dental marketing people are willing to come onto our podcast. He actually came on and we did a super deep dive on where AI is at and what's going on with AI search. And today we're going to talk about what's going on with AI chatbots because he built out a chatbot, we built out a chatbot. And so there's a lot of information. And at the end, I'm going to give away an ebook that he wrote, and we'll give that information right down below. But Adrian, I'm super excited to talk to you about this subject because it we're we're just at the beginning and people don't realize that. And I one thing that I've noticed, I was just talking to my business partner about this because he's the one that developed the whole AI side of it. And I was telling him, I was like, everybody I talk to has been burnt by AI. Like everybody's like, everybody's on their second iteration. Not everybody, but a lot of people are like, oh man, I want to do, I want to do AI. This is great. They integrated and then they're like, oh, this is really bad. They had a lot of patients complaining about it. I think we're just now at the point for some agents where people aren't feeling that way anymore. And which is awesome. So where do we start this conversation around AI chatbots? What are your thoughts? I'll let you drive the boat a little bit here.
SPEAKER_02Let's talk about. No, I appreciate that, Gary. And um, thank you for the kind introduction. I think I think the best place to start with this is we the reason that you're developing something, that we're developing something, is because we have to solve the problem of missed phone calls. It's just astronomical. Like Gary, if you missed 30, 35% of your phone calls at your company, would you even be in business?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we'd go out of business.
SPEAKER_02We'd go out of business too. Yep. And that's the I think that's the average. About 30, 35% of all calls go missed in a dental practice. And it's like when you stuff when you conservatively do the math on that, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in missed annual revenue. So, how do you solve that problem? Well, you can have somebody have a cell phone that your your call, your main phone number forwards to 24-7. Nobody wants to do that. You can hire, you can hire like, you know, uh uh an outbound or inbound agency with human beings answering calls, you know. That's horrible. Almost always hard. That's horrible. Almost every time that goes bad, and there's lots of reasons for it. Or you can try and tackle this whole AI thing, which is like it promises that the problem, you know, that the problem can be solved. And to your point, two or three, two, two and a half years ago, we started developing ours, it was rough. It was really, really rough. But but and we can talk about why it was rough, but but now it's like I can't see the animal practice without an AI receptionist agent or some kind of an AI voice agent in their practice in the next two or three years and staying competitive. It's just not going to be possible.
SPEAKER_00You have to, and and the reason, the reason why is just purely a numerical thing. So if you have 35% of calls go missed during normal business hours, a lot of that just has to do with influx at certain times, where even if you have two receptionists full time, you're not going to catch all the calls. You just can't. And so a lot of times I hear dental offices say, we answer 100% of the calls. It's like, no, you don't. Yeah, it's not possible. Um, so then, okay, so you got 35% go miss there, but then you miss 100% of after hour calls. And let's say you close at four and your competitor closes at six, like people will just keep calling until they reach somebody, or they'll go to your website, fill out a form, and then you call the form and it's like, oh, we already scheduled somewhere else. So there's a there's so much slippage there. I actually did the math on this and I just did a podcast on it, Adrian. You would have loved it. It's it's just on averages. So if you just take what the average human misses the calls, after hour calls, and then and then the average conversion rate of new patients, the average office is losing $100,000 a year in treatment, and that's at $1,500 a patient. That's not counting no shows because of schedule. That's just like basic phone skills. And AI literally, from my vantage point, like what we're tracking, it's all it literally solves it. Like it's uh you never hit a voicemail again, and you can get the agent scheduling 70 to 80 percent, depending on some of the variables at your your office, insurance, um, average time to appointment, those kind of things, it it can make it go higher or lower. So why like at this and it's cheap, right? Like a real relatively super cheap.
SPEAKER_01Super cheap.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, super cheap. So what what's your data on voicemail? Because one of the one of the things, like meaning how many patients actually leave voicemail now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that I don't I don't actually know that, I just know how many are hitting it. So it's it between eight and five on the days that you're open, let's say you're open Monday through Thursday, eight to five, thirty-five percent of those calls go missed. So now some of those are existing patients, some of them are vendors, but it just for easy matters.
SPEAKER_02There's still some patients in there.
SPEAKER_00There's new patients in there that you're missing. So if you're spending ten thousand dollars on marketing a month just to use round numbers, thirty five hundred of that is blown on missed calls, just right off the top, which is huge. Again, to yours, to mine and your businesses, we wouldn't be able to function. Yeah, we would last maybe three to six months, and then we would start saying, Man, we just don't have enough new people coming in to support what we're doing. And I think most businesses would be that way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Dennis can could ask any uh Gen X or millennial, if they get sent to voicemail, how often do they actually leave a voicemail? And the statistics are super strong. It's like 70, 80% of people don't even leave voicemails, they just call the next office.
SPEAKER_00You know what I say on my voicemail? My voicemail says, and I do this because I go.
SPEAKER_02Don't leave a voicemail.
SPEAKER_00It says, Don't leave a voicemail. I do not check my voicemail, text me or email me, and you have my number, you're calling. And if you can't text, like as soon as someone's like, I can't text you, I'm like, I don't want to talk to you. Right? Like, I and and then if you don't know my email, then you probably like it's not like my email's super secret, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02Like when when we were when we were launching this, um we just we tried to like narrow this down to a one-line statement that would make sense of what an AI receptionist is. And it is the new, it's it's not the new voicemail, but it is the thing that will replace voicemail. Voicemail's dead. If you think your voicemail is a good technological thing, you're you're in you're living in the dark, like you're missing so much money.
SPEAKER_00In 2006, 2007, I started like one of my first like real, real jobs. I worked at Dairy Queen and like as a sh a cook at a couple of fast food places, but then I got a job as a mortgage broker before the economy completely cut collapsed. And um, we used to during that time, everybody used to FedEx all the docs, and and or you could FedEx them or you could fax them. And fax was like amazing, right? Like a piece of technology. But then email started getting like super popular, right? Right around that time. Like email, and so you could email them and then print them out and sign them and then mail them back if they needed to be wet signatures or fax, you know, scan them and email them back, and just email to fax, like email killed fax, like it disappeared overnight because this new technology was so much better. And then I saw a second wave of that when when uh text messaging came out. And now I went when the email, when we went from fax to email, I wasn't in dental, but when I we went from email to um to text messaging, or you know, basically the only option where the dental office was to call. And then we went to text messaging to communicate. Here's what Dennis used to tell me. I don't know if you remember this or not. They used to say, This isn't gonna work. I'm never gonna use it. I hate text messaging. It really devalues the human connection. And I want people to hear my teen's voice, and I want to hear their voice, and I want to be empathetic. And there was, I remember talking with Dennis going, dude, you're crazy. This is like an infinitely better way to communicate because it speeds up the process for me to get what I want as the consumer. Now, eventually everybody got on board with it, but I feel like AI is in the same place right now.
SPEAKER_02Totally, totally. And and voicemail will not be a technology anybody's using in the next few years. It's just, it's just going. It's it's on its way out.
SPEAKER_00So, how's that gonna so how does that like gonna work? Well, where do you want to take this? Do you want to go? Do you want to talk about our current state and then a little bit more and then uh kind of veer out? Or do you want to talk about like future state of this?
SPEAKER_02Let's talk about why AI receptionists. Well, you mentioned in the intro here that a lot of dentists have tried AI receptionists, they're like, Yeah, I'm not doing this. Let's talk about the problems that people were running into and then kind of give an update on where the technology is at now. Okay, and why and why you and why you have spent time and energy and probably a ton of resources in like leaning into this because it because you see where it's going. Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_00And a very to be honest with you, is it's not a lot of money in it. You know what I mean? Like when you're talking about, oh, it's two to three, four hundred bucks a month for this agent and you're paying for these tokens to use, like you're talking about a very small amount of money that goes to the agency. So it's this is not we're not building this right now to make a bunch of money on an AI agent. It's because of the future. So we'll talk about that in a moment. But yeah, so number one, the biggest thing was people were putting in this technology, and the dentist had no idea if it was good or bad or indifferent. What was happening was is we were raising the red flag to them. So we were like, hey, just so you know, you're losing, like, we're tracking your AI agent. It's losing 80%, 70% of your new patients when you miss calls. So that's number one. Don't be mad at us at the end of the month. But then number two, the patients were calling the office and they would spam the office and then yell at the front desk, or the people like, your AI agent just hallucinated on me, and just you know they want to use the word hallucinate, but just put me in this loop. And and we've all had that experience before. Um and I that that was the biggest thing, I think, that Dennis then were like, all right, turn it off.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. There was a there was a really big problem with latency. So what would happen is somebody would call, an AI agent would pick up, and there would be a long delay, like two seconds, maybe three seconds, as the AI was churning. I mean, they have to take the voice, transcribe it into text, tokenize it, send it to the AI brain, get the response in a token, put it back into text, then put it back into voice, and then respond. And so the latency was really slow. And so somebody would ask a question, the human would, and the AI would take a little bit too long, and then they'd ask a second question because they didn't know if there was somebody there, and then it would jumble the conversation. That was like one functional problem, it was an issue. And that's pretty much gone now. I mean, the the the amount of investment that's gone into these large language models has sped that up significantly. So that now you actually have to train the I agents to slow down a little bit so they sound freaking human and they're not answering too quick. So latency was a big issue. Uh that's one. A second issue that was happening was that the AI agents didn't have enough context. So when when we when we launched our AI agent, um there were probably only two or three other companies that launched one. Now there's 200 companies that have got, I mean, everybody's jumped into this game and they're just creating something and throwing it thrown at the wall. And so what you had to do in order to make this AI agent really, really good is you had to get like super, super deep in its contextual training. And so we spent a ton of time developing layers of information that the a that that specific agent was trained to. So it's not like just talking to Chat GPT and getting a response. You'd have to have a layer that's like a sales framework layer. You have to have all the information of the practice that is online in the agent. When did they start? Who are the doctors? What's their history? You know, where do you how do you find the practice if you're lost, right? Like in using like landmarks. Oh, I see that you're you're on Main Street, you have to drive another half a mile down the road, hang a ride at the Wendy's. You have to give it that kind of information so that when somebody is asking any freaking weird question, it has context for it. And it took us a long time and a lot of trial and error to get that contextual layering of information so that the agent is actually like a freaking human being. Like it, it answers everything. Like it was a really great employee. And that took a while to build. And I don't think a lot of people have that.
SPEAKER_00No, and and what what most people don't realize about AI, and I'm going through this right now. So I have an executive assistant, and I'm she she's uh adverse to AI, like she naturally doesn't want to use it, right? And I'm like, hey, look, AI can do a certain percentage of your job already. I'd rather have you learn this AI and you keep doing your job, doing all the things with AI, because your output's going to be way more, and I don't have to do that section of it. You know what I mean? So we're going through and we're learning AI. And one of the things I'm working with her on is like, it's like think of like a little kid that knows everything. What can you do with a little kid that knows everything, but doesn't know like a lot about you or anything. It's like very powerful, but also can do a lot of stupid stuff too. Yeah, can screw it up. So I said, you so think of this as like a new team member that you have to train to be able to do what you want it to do. So I'm like, first thing, tell them who you are and what your job is, and then who I am, and then give it information on that, and then it's going to be able to better respond to everything else you do after that. So that's like the first layer with like any of these agents that are out there now, and then the phone conversion side of it, an AI receptionist, which is like an agent, right, that has a specific job. But you have to train it. And so the one of the issues that I've seen, I'd love your thoughts on this, is the dentist all have their, they all want here's what they do. Let me see your demo, and then and then we record these, and then they try to break it. And they're asking it all these crazy dental. Crazy questions. Yeah, crazy questions. Yeah, and I'm like, here's here's our rules like, look, we'll do a live demo with you. We'll give you the demo afterwards if you want, but if you're gonna if you're gonna try to break it clinically, you're gonna break it clinically. These are not trained to do anything clinical. This is trained to schedule patients and solve these little problems that they have, and we're not really interested in your scripting support on that because you're gonna make it worse, not better. What I've seen is I've seen agents absolutely go off the rails because they allowed the dentist to give all of their opinion on how the scripting should flow. And frankly, most of the time, if not almost every single time, it ended in a net negative from an AI standpoint of being able to actually solve the problem that it was created uh created to solve. What's your I you don't have to cosign that statement, but what are your thoughts on that and like what have you seen on your end?
SPEAKER_02Super, super helpful. So the when you train an AI agent, it's more important to train the AI agent on what it should not say as much, or I should say that's probably more important than what it should say. So an example would be let's say you're talking, like practices get you know, calls from patients all the time just asking for the price of like an implant or whatever, right? Now, some practices may feel like they want to mention the price. Some not my recommendation, okay? I think there's a better way to handle that, okay. Other practices have a sales framework, or if they don't have one, you can build one for them that basically says here's how you handle the question of how much does a dental implant cost. It's the same SOP as training your front desk. Here's what you say, here's a follow-up question, here's how you get around that objection, right? So when you go in and train the agent, what you're training in is on what do you not say that is almost as important or more important than what you do say. And as soon as you start building that out, you actually, I mean, you've been in sales for freaking ever. I've been in sales. Training a salesperson is one of the most sophisticated technical skills that you can get at.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because you have to go into every layer, you have to know what's going to be asked, and then what do you say, and then what is the person going to ask seven times after that.
SPEAKER_02Yep, and you got to know that. So, what you're doing is if you were to think back of you training a salesperson in one of your roles and all of your jobs, you give them a sales framework that is dialed in. Now, if you if you're talking about a dentist office that does a good job on training the front desk, they have a sales framework.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they don't call it that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they don't call it a sales framework, it's it's whatever you want to call it, but that's what it is. Okay. But when you get your front desk trained on that, if they can stick to it, they do great. And it's great for you as a marketing company because now you're converting, they're converting in more of the leads that you're driving to the practice, right? But 98% of practices do a shit job at making sure their front desk sticks to a sales framework. But an AI agent can be built and it stays the same.
SPEAKER_00Stays the same, yeah. So this is actually really interesting. So we we started with missed calls, so AI agents can solve that. But then from there, based on how you design it, it'll either do way better than your team or it'll do way worse than your team. And it's like, well, what is better or worse? So these are just some numbers that I have. The average human, like and how we measure this, is when a dental office comes on and onboards with us, we track all of their phone conversion. Almost everybody comes on and converts pay new patients at 50%. That is just like baseline where people are at, right? Like, and do some come on a little bit better, a little bit worse? Sure. But what we've noticed is 50% is kind of the baseline. AI agents, if not set up correctly, we've seen about 30% because it's it's so miscombobulated with uh uh you know doctor input and how to do this. But what we've realized, the reason that these offices are converting at 50% is because the doctor puts governors on the kinds of patients that they want to see, and they do it from a framework that doesn't allow it it basically is like you're gonna block out all these insurances, you're gonna block out all this, this, this, this. And I'm only talking about qualified patients. So this isn't a Medicaid patient calling and then not scheduling, right? That doesn't count if you don't take Medicaid because it's unqualified. I'm talking about, hey, do you take ABC insurance? And depending on how your team answers that, or if, hey, do you uh how much is a dental implant or how much is a filling? And depending on how your team answers that, you'll either capture like 90% of those opportunities or you lose 100% of them. And it's usually a framework that the Doctor has built that that allows those people to come in or not come in. Um, and so what we've seen is if we train a human, they'll go like really listen to their calls, play them. Hey, here's the scripting, here's how I want you to handle this, insurance questions, pricing questions. Those are the two main ones. What happens is that human will go from 50% up into the like mid-60s, maybe 70%. And that's like, that's like pretty good. And then you can get a human up to 80% of qualified new patients, but you have to ride them and you have to stay on top of them constantly. And then what we've realized is like AI can get there almost instantly, can get right into the 70% range almost instantly, and then you can tweak a couple things in the office, quicker appointments, stuff like that, that will allow you to push up a little bit above that 75%. Um, so, anyways, that's how that's how I'm kind of that's how I see it, is like I see it in like these stages of what's possible. Um, how how are you thinking through that?
SPEAKER_02Like what do you I think my numbers are very similar. Then then the um meaning I've seen well now, now that we've got over the last few months is if we've kind of like finalized building out a really sophisticated framework for handling objections and that kind of stuff, and and we've built in like call forwarding, and you know, if they get into a call with a patient and the and the the patient really needs to s speak with somebody and it's after hours, they can call forward to a number, or if it's an emergency, we handle like we've tried to fix a lot of the problems of just like the capabilities of the AI agent isn't just answering questions, it's like sending emails, scheduling, sending it to a to a emergency calls to a specific number, or texting the doctor, or texting the office manager. That's really helped to convert. And since that's happened, I think we're definitely above 50% in conversion. I don't know the exact number is, but it's definitely above 50%. The number that I look at, that's just a kind of a why would you not do this number? Is with smaller practices, $600,000, $800,000 a month, they are generating at least $5,000 a month in new revenue.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's six to hundreds, six to eight hundred thousand dollars a year or a month? And annual revenue. And annually, okay, okay. Small practice, small practice. Yeah, very small. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Very small. On the top end, our clients, some of our larger clients are doing two, three million dollars a year. And those of those practices are generating fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars in in new patient revenue through the AI agent. So why the hell would you not do it? It's just like, hello, you know, and these are missed, these are missed phone calls.
SPEAKER_00And then how do you so let's talk about like why wouldn't you do it? So the first question that will pop into my mind that a dentist, once they get over the trust hump, and you can see the data, like go in, and let's say they trust it now, they didn't trust it, they trusted now, or they're at least trying willing to try it, would be costs. Like, what are we talking cost-wise?
SPEAKER_02500 bucks, a thousand. Well, it depends on, you know, so the way that we the way that we we bill ours is we have a flat rate that starts about 250 a month, plus the kind of like the tokenization of usage cost, which is a few dollars per call. Or you can go with an unlimited plan that's around six, seven hundred dollars a month, and and you can get the full thing. So we're not talking about a lot. We're we're talking about less than a thousand dollars to generate tens of thousands of dollars in additional revenue and standardize, standardize the front desk or the missed call process and not have to deal with the freaking brain damage of like training somebody. You build it and it it's built, and then it learns and it gets better and better and better. So it's not it's not it's not very expensive, you know? And it really so to us as dental marketing uh companies, right? Like when I talk to a dentist and they're like wanting to spend, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month or a few thousand dollars a month in ads or marketing costs, we're like, you have to have an AI agent because I'm gonna drive all this freaking traffic. You're gonna start getting calls at seven o'clock at night. And if you're missing the calls, you're gonna fire us. Because and we're just like, we're not I I won't I don't want to be fired. I want you to generate the revenue. So like we have to have it involved in any marketing campaign in order to justify the costs.
SPEAKER_00I have somebody on the bleeding edge that we work with, and he he let us, he he he didn't let us, he told us he was like, we had it for missed calls and after hour calls, right? So that's what normally what we do. So ours is ours is like literally dirt cheap, like just for missed calls, $299, but it's just not taking existing patients. So I think that's one of the big differences here uh is we don't deal with existing patients, just new patients. And he said, I want to take it, I want to let it take all new patient calls. So he had 166 new patients last month, and I was like, okay, like we'll do it, let's just watch it every day. So um I looked at it last month and it finished at like 72% and took almost every single call, or almost every single new patient call. Like there was a couple that snuck in other ways and stuff, but like it he's the first person that's done that. Have you had anybody? I haven't I don't have anybody else who's brave enough to do that. Have you had anybody else that's like, I'll let it take all my calls? Like, I'm I don't want to use the human anymore.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we've had a few clients ask us to do that, and we discouraged them from it. I did that.
SPEAKER_00I was like, are you sure you want to do this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We've had we've had a few. Uh we did do it for a little while, and I think we encouraged them to pull back on a couple different practices. I mean, the age we ended up picking up like 1,500 phone calls because we're not just doing new patients, doing all calls that are missed, right? These are bigger, bigger practices that are missing a ton of phone calls. I my opinion on this is that you should always drive your patients' phone calls to a human being if you've got one available and that is trained correctly and can handle the call, okay? And then you turn on your AI receptionist as as overflow. That that that that that's the way to do it. And you can even limit that.
SPEAKER_00Do you think in the future that eventually all the calls will be answered by AI agents just because it's a better experience? Meaning they answer the question correctly every single time, they get the patient in faster, the team isn't blocking them.
SPEAKER_02I think I think what what will happen, I don't necessarily that that's probably gonna happen. Okay. I I think that my stance on that will always be always let the calls come in, but then train your team to I mean if there's somebody standing in front of them, a patient, and the call on the phone rings, don't answer the phone. The AI agent's gonna handle you, handle the patient in front of you. So I I think it's always gonna be AI with human in the loop, or human with AI in the loop. Um I I just don't think that I think this idea that AI is gonna like take over human being interaction is as the as a as a better way for humans to to interact. I don't think it's ever gonna happen.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think I think it it's gonna allow us to interact at scale. So let's go back to technology that we know about, and this is this is my opinion, right? So it's like so text message comes out. Old older people at that time did not like it. Like I remember because memories used to charge you per text message too. So I remember texting people and they would call me, freaking out, why are you texting me, Gary? That was 20 bucks. I'm like, okay, okay, sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. And like people like really hated there was a group of people that really hated text messaging. But what text messaging allowed us to do is allowed us to communicate at scale, right? So I could be texting with 10 people at the same time, all interacting with all of them, where versus if you took before it was phone calls, so you could only do one at a time. So we had this interaction at scale. Right now, where we're at with dental offices is that you have people at the front desk who are supposed to be interacting with patients in the office, but they're so inundated with so many other things that it's lowering the experience in the office. Like the in-office experience is cruddy because they're being pulled in so many directions. So if we can off some of that and keep the experience high, I think that's like the best of all worlds. Just like text messaging, if you call me, you're not gonna get a hold of me. If you text message me, I'm gonna respond pretty quickly, usually. So it's like you get a better experience. Is it still talking with Gary on the phone? No, but you're still reaching Gary and you're still getting the information that you need now much faster. That's how I see it. Is that it's like an augmented patient experience?
SPEAKER_01Totally. Yep. That's exactly how I see it. And and yeah, so we're in agreement there for sure.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so let's talk about this then. So, this is what I want to do. So, what I'm really excited about is like the next thing is we have these forms, you have these widgets on websites, you have Facebook ads, you have all these different things. And I know you do all these things, right? And these are black holes. Most people don't realize these are black holes, and these we we track these. Most offices convert these kinds of leads around 10%, meaning 10% of them get scheduled. So you get 100 leads. Now, now I'll say this: there are outliers of offices who have people who are dedicated dedicated just to responding to forms, those kind of things, and they'll be much higher. They'll be up into the 30, 40% range, but that's very few offices have that. So most people just say, yeah, front desk, as these leads come in, all these forms, there's all different kinds. Um, the office kind of gets back to them when they get back to them, and you end up with this like very low conversion to schedule rate, meaning if you get 100 leads, 10 of them actually schedule, and then a fraction of those actually show up. So you don't, it's it's really a lot of wasted motion by all parties. We're really excited because the AI agent's gonna be able to have those conversations with the patient via text. And there's two things here, and it kind of ties into the last conversation that we just talked about. Number one, the patient isn't gonna know it's AI that they're texting with. They won't, they will think it's the office. Like 100% they'll think it's the office, and they'll just be like, oh yeah, da-da-da-da. So that's number one. Number two, all of a sudden, your effectiveness rate of this kind of marketing is gonna go through the roof. We're talking 3, 4, 5x based on what you're currently getting. Um, so I'm really excited about that. And then every widget or every ad will just be integrated with an AI agent that's doing the text messaging. So that way it's like you hit the website, you got a question, boom, get your question answered, schedule, and it goes. And then you can do this with existing patients too. It's the same experience. The text messaging you won't realize that you're dealing with an AI agent. So if you'll you'll have people who unscheduled treatment, you'll have um recare, you'll have, and then, and then the next layer to that will be uh dynamic scheduling handling, meaning new patient calls, says, Hey, I want to schedule for uh next week on Thursday, and we say, Great, dumb, boom, boom, the AI agent schedules it, let's say, great, you're confirmed. You'll be receiving a text message two days before. Make sure you confirm on that. If you don't, you don't get your spot. The AI agent will reach out two days before via text. Hey, just wanted to confirm, you just have to give us a thumbs up that you're planning on coming still. If not, then we're gonna replace your spot. And if they don't respond or they say, no, never mind, I'm canceling, then the AI agent will reach out for a recare and unscheduled treatment or any new patients and try to fill that slot before so that you don't have these gaps. So this is multiple multiple layer, right? There's each of this has to be done in layers. That's a future, like we're rolling that out this year, um, multiple layers of that. What are your like, where do you see that? What holes are you seeing?
SPEAKER_02What no, that's exactly where it's going. So so let me let me let me uh yeah. So what you've described is is obviously something that you're going to build as a marketing agency in order to increase conversion to justify the investment cost for for your marketing services. Every marketing company is gonna do this that freaking has their head not in the sand because it's the only way to retain your client. Okay. So, marketing company, like we're building stuff very similar to what you're talking about. Let me let me let me just describe a couple of the like the aspects of making that happen. The first thing that has to happen in order for all of that to work is you have to be you have to have an API integration with read-write capability into the practice management system. So there are uh and this is a good idea. So explain that for the audience. So explain that for the audience.
SPEAKER_00So our agent has that, your agent has that, so like explain what that means. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And this is a little bit plugged for our companies, okay? So an API integration is a communication connection between the AI agent and the practice management system. Okay, they have to be able to communicate with each other. Now, API integrations give you read capability, which means the AI agent can read like your open slots in your schedule, it can read data inside the practice management systems, and they also have write capability, which means they can write to it, which means if you have read-write capability, which is the gold standard in this, if if I am a patient, I um uh I see one of your ads for one of your clients, I talk to your chat bot, and I say, I'd like to schedule for next Tuesday. Your agent reads the open schedule, finds the open slots, says, Well, I can have you come in at 11 or 12, and I say I'd like to take 12, and it writes that into the schedule. Okay. Now, that capability is like absolutely paramount to AI being super effective. There are lots of AI agents out there that do not have API integration. I can't read it right. I would say it's they can't read right. I would say it's much of the AI. Yeah, most of them don't. Yeah. And here's the here's the problem. If you can't schedule directly into the schedule, if the patient can't do that scheduling process now, it requires sending a form to the practice, and they got to call the patient back.
SPEAKER_00You're right back at square one.
SPEAKER_02You're gonna lose, you're gonna lose.
SPEAKER_00So what you have, what you built, is an AI, and that when you and I got on, we talked about this because I was like, hey, what road are we gonna go down on this? Because the end result of this is like you are either an AI agent that can schedule calls and do it effectively, or you are a smart voicemail. And that's like that's that's where we're at. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02So here's here's the here's the sneaky problem with this is that I talk to doctors all the time. They're like, I don't want you to touch my schedule. So they don't the the capability, and and then this stuff is flawless. Like you can set this API integration up so that it it schedules exactly like you want it to schedule. Okay. It's not gonna like put stuff in the wrong place, it's not, it's not gonna not confirm, it's gonna do everything exactly like your your your employee would. But doctors are so or office managers mostly are so concerned about the way that they've been doing things.
SPEAKER_00They don't even like the way their team does it.
SPEAKER_02You know what I mean? But here, but yeah, but here's the problem. It doesn't matter what your team wants. Your patient does not want to spend more than 30 seconds to schedule an appointment. They don't want to call back, they don't want to have to get an email, they just want to like freaking see the ad, and get my questions answered, and schedule the appointment. It should be as easy as ordering DoorDash. And if you think it's not that, you're you're you're you're wrong. You're just flat out wrong. Patients want simplicity. So, what you're building, what you describe to be as building, is a very sophisticated agent that is like deeply ingrained in the practice, understands everything, is directly connected to the practice management system, and schedules and takes out all over all that labor. It's like freeing up all that time.
SPEAKER_00The goal of AI is so the internet is a good example. We don't think about the internet, or electricity is another good one. We don't think about electricity, we don't ask how electricity works. We just plug, we ask what I can plug into it, right? And do I have the proper adapters to pull the power for this, like versus my Tesla charger at my house versus my washer versus my fridge versus my computer, right? Like that's all we ask. And then from there we can start building amazing things. We don't think about the power grid, we don't think about any of those kind of things because it's already been built, where AI is so new right now, everybody's like, wait, how's this gonna work?
SPEAKER_02How does the power grid work? Yeah, how does the power grid work, right?
SPEAKER_00And it's like, okay, where we're at right now is we're asking, how does AI work? But when when it's gonna be effective, and I think we will get there this year with some of this, and when I say this year, 2026, is no one knows that AI is even working. It just works. And meaning the patient's interacting with it, it thinks it's interacting with the human. The office has it running on the back end to fill their schedule proactively and properly, and they don't even think about it, and they're just like, oh yeah, my day's always full. We don't have gaps in the schedule, or very limited gaps, because something's happening and these patients are getting on. Something's happening. That's when you know that you've got something. Like to me, that's the the holy grail, is when no one knows what's going on.
SPEAKER_02That's where it's going. Absolutely. That's where it's going. That's what you're building, that's what we're building, and that's what's gonna set apart an effective marketing system versus a non-effective marketing system. It has to be, it's not just the advertising to get awareness, it's the advertising to get a butt in the chair and roll that ROI revenue back in to show what kind of money you're making. That that's it. That's that's the new game.
SPEAKER_00Well, so you you're I got one more question for you, and this is gonna be totally uh coming out of left field. So I'm very interested in how you're gonna answer this one. It has nothing to do with what we talked about, but it does have to do with AI. But before we do, how can people, I got your book down below. How can people um reach out to you, get connected with you, learn more about you?
SPEAKER_02So I wrote this ebook. It's just called the Beyond Chat Bots. It's kind of uh an ebook that describes the evolution of what old chat chat bots were like and kind of what AI can do. It's a great ebook. Um, I'd love for you to download it. Just put the link in the description. Um, it's a free ebook. Um the but my company's mysocialpractice.com. You can go to mysocialpractice.com and in our services, there's an AI receptionist tab there that talks all about our AI receptionist. And um, yeah, we'd we'd love to chat.
SPEAKER_00So okay, so here's the here's the left field question. I'm putting this at the end because if I don't have any idea what you're gonna say. So maybe this won't be good content, maybe it'll be the best content ever. So recently a doctor posted in a Facebook group, a dental Facebook group, and I know you're not as as uh active on Facebook, which I don't blame you. Probably you probably have much better mental health than I do from that. But um the he posted, he said, hey guys, this is a doctor. I I'm not sure if he's a dentist, he's some kind of doctor, and he's in all these dental groups. And he said, Hey guys, I fired my SEO company. I was paying them $2,000 a month. I fired my social media manager. I was paying them like you know $500 or $1,000 a month for post, they were just posting random stuff. And now I have OpenClaw running all of it, and it's amazing. I'm saving $3,000 a month now. And look, he posted some charts and things like that. And I asked him, I was like, number one, I've played with Open Claw, super powerful, but it's very scary because I got banned and shut out of a bunch of things because it'll just let you do things and start building bridges, and then all of a sudden you're violating terms of services without even knowing it, and it's just like brute force, brute force. And so then I started getting banned out of things, and I'm like, okay, I gotta slow down on this because I'm gonna get in trouble. That's number one. Number two, I had to play with it a lot, it broke a lot, and it was wrong. Its opinions on marketing and how things should be done was wrong like 20 to 30 percent of the time. So, meaning I and I the only reason I knew that is because I've been doing this forever. So I'm like, dude, that's not the play. Like, that's gonna actually lose you new patients, uh, because it's just using a generic playbook, right? Of what marketing is, which what which every dentist would end up in that camp. So I asked him, I said, hey, what's your lift on new patients? Like, great, you're saving $3,000. How much time did you put in? And then how much, how many new patients have you got? He hasn't responded to he's like, I'll get back to you, Gary, on that. What are your thoughts on that kind of stuff?
SPEAKER_02If first of all, the one reason you should not do anything with open claw is because it's not HIPAA compliant. So there you go.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay, but let's say it is let's say it is HIPAA compliant, or you're only using it for marketing stuff on the front end so that it's not interacting with any patient data.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So bypass the most alarming red flag about OpenClaw. The I what let's let me just describe what it is to our audience in the stands. Open claw is an additional. AI system that is just blowing people's minds because it can work in the background on projects while you're asleep. Um, well, first thing is with no guardrails.
SPEAKER_00It has no guardrails. I'll add in, I'll add in this. Like, I go in and I'm like, hey, I want you to connect my CRM to my Facebook page, to my Slack channel, to my everything else. And I want you to start building these bridges. So it builds a it connects the API and then it starts communicating here. And I and then I started having it text people on like I said, when this happens, then this happens, then I want you to text them. And it was amazing. I was like, dude, I just built this in like an afternoon, but then all of a sudden it started spam texting people.
SPEAKER_02It's like just goes off the rails.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it goes just completely off the rails, right? And it's like, okay, now I need to build these guardrails in. So and then I got it started getting suspended from certain sites because it was against their terms of service. I'm not a developer, so I don't I didn't read anybody's terms of service. I'm just like, whatever, I'm gonna build what I want to build. Um, so yeah, so that's that's what it is.
SPEAKER_02All right. So um I I I think the these the the initial, I mean, OpenClaw came out like three months ago. Like it's I mean, we're super, super early in the development of agentic AI agents, okay? I think long-term, ultimately, what's going to happen, Gary, is your company and my company will have an agentic AI system built inside of it that does this for our clients. That's where we're going.
SPEAKER_00With our with our spin on it. Is that right?
SPEAKER_02With our spin with the HIPAA compliance, with all of that. I mean, that's what I am I'm like right now, like flipping services on their head and redoing them in an automated agencai way so that maybe in the next two years I'll have an AI agentic engine that runs my company. Okay. It makes sense to do that because it gives it the ability to manage and streamline and and uh the value, lower costs, but keep the value of our product at a certain level and make changes across the board. For a dentist going out to build this, it is so damn complicated. I would say that like you no, it is like I can't get dentists to send me a freaking photograph.
SPEAKER_00So so my team when I told them a review when I told them about this, because I said, look, guys, somebody's gonna reach out to you and ask you about this because it's been getting posted, and and and then I know some of our clients are in there. So they're gonna ask you, and this is what's going on, and they said, Whoa, wait, I have dentists that don't know how to use Zoom.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. It's too, it's so complicated. It sounds easy. You see a TikTok thing come through, like, oh my gosh, I just built an entire marketing system in l in an afternoon, and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I've seen a hundred of those videos come through.
SPEAKER_00Well, and a lot of the things that got me early on, because I people started posting those. I saw them on Twitter, and I'm like, dude, I have to do this. Once I got in and I started doing it, I was like, ah, these people are creating content. They didn't actually create anything that of value, they just spun up something and generic. Yeah, something generic, but it's like, you didn't solve any of the moths and any of the things. Now, I will say, I would be much more concerned if you're like in software only. And this is where a lot of the AI bros get really confused that come into Dental, is because it's super easy to connect your Slack, which is your communication in most agencies, to your CRM. It's not hard to do, it's very simple to do. In Dental, connecting communications to your PMS is not easy to do. And the PMSs are gonna fight you tooth and nail. And then connecting your marketing to your communication to your PMS is still most marketing companies don't do that. You know what I mean? So it's just like there's so many motes in Dental because of HIPAA, because of all these different things. So that's once I got in, that's what I figured out. I was like, ah, this is not gonna work the way most people think.
SPEAKER_02It's super generic. So, so like when you build a marketing campaign for it for one of your clients, you're not building a generic campaign. It's not the same campaign as everybody else. You have to like bring in some of the humanity, you know, some of the personality into that campaign. Like your headlines are different, you know. I mean, you might be talking about the same kind of thing, but you but you have to build it with some brand sense. And so that that creative aspect in terms of like software development and AI and marketing, that really has to be done by a human. So I don't think that there's a way that this standards can say, oh, I just built this marketing engine in an afternoon and I'm saving myself $3,000. Because what that doctor's gonna get is likely generic shit that doesn't really convert, which goes back to your point of like conversion. And and just building it doesn't mean like you have to watch this stuff. Those like I have a so I have a few different uh automation systems that they freaking break all the time. They break all the time.
SPEAKER_00And we're and again, I just want to call out you're not these are not automations that um or or rules that you're building with like super complicated PMSs that are super messy. These are with tools that are very, very clean. Basic stuff. Yeah, yeah, basic stuff. Agreed. I it it breaks all the time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So the way that this is gonna happen, Gary, is your company, my company, other forward-thinking marketing companies are going to build internally agentic AI systems to drop costs, streamline processes, stay HIPAA compliant, and we will deliver that to our client. That's how it's gonna be. There's no like it would literally be like you say, Oh, I'm gonna become an endodontist from YouTube, and you're gonna freaking go watch a bunch of videos and become an endodontist. No, that's not how it works. Like it is super, super, super complicated. And I just I think it's so far beyond what should be delivered to the industry.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm with you. Okay, cool. We're aligned on that. I figured, I figured as much, but I didn't know for sure where that was gonna go. Well, this was a really good episode. I appreciate you coming on and uh you did a great job. Uh make sure you check out his ebook, check out their AI agent, um, check out our AI agent too, do your homework and uh just uh make sure that you have something. It's better to have something than nothing at this point. Yeah, I totally agree. All right. Thanks so much, my friend.
SPEAKER_01Such a pleasure, man.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.