AI & The Dental Practice

What does AI actually mean for your dental practice right now? In this executive session, host Wes sits down with Michael Anderson from Wonderist Agency, one of the nation's largest dental marketing firms, and Dr. Megan Shelton of Shelton Solutions to cut through the hype and talk about what's really changing.

They cover the dramatic shift in patient search behavior (ChatGPT now accounts for 20% of all searches and is growing), why the fundamentals of digital marketing still drive AI search results, how AI-informed patients are showing up differently at the front desk, and why the human connection at the center of your practice is more valuable than ever.

Wes also shares a powerful framework from Lawrence Ford's book The Difference Between Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom and explains exactly how Practice CFO is approaching AI adoption, client investment strategy, and the future of financial advisory.

What You'll Learn

• Why 20% of patients are now searching for a dentist via ChatGPT — and what that means for your marketing
• The "unsatisfying but true" answer to ranking in AI search: go back to the basics
• Why AI-generated content is not penalized — but lazy AI content is a dead end
• How the AI-prepped patient is changing chair-side conversations and silently eroding trust
• The knowledge → intelligence → wisdom framework and why wisdom is AI-proof
• Why documenting your SOPs is the mandatory first step before any AI automation
• What Practice CFO is doing with client investment strategy in an AI-dominated market

Transcript:

Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Dental Boardroom Podcast. It is Wes, your host here at Practice CFO, excited for yet another episode because we're doing one of my favorite sessions, which are the
executive sessions. And so we have with us Michael Anderson with Wonderist Agency and Dr.Megan Shelton with Shelton Solutions. Welcome, team.Good to be here. Good morning. All right. Excited to have you. We're gonna talk about a subject That is on everybody's mind, which is AI, and we will probably have many conversations around this in our podcast series together. Let me just, um, share my thoughts on this. Since AI is moving faster than just about anything we've seen in our industry, it's already changing how practices market themselves, how patients find a dentist, and even how the team works day to day. There's just a lot of hype out there and a lot of confusion about what actually matters. So in today's episode, we wanna try to cut through that and talk about the real impact AI is having on practices, specifically how search behavior is changing among patients to find a dentist, how AI is being used as a tool inside the practice, and what it all means for your marketing.So part one, team, we're gonna talk about AI. How is AI changing how patients find you? Let's kick off. Michael, I'm gonna ask you this since you are the king of marketing for dentists as one of the largest, uh, dental marketing firms in the country at Wonderist Agency, which is, by the way, here in San Diego with me, but you work with clients all over. You have a lot of clients, a big team, so you think about this a lot, and I'm sure you have, um, addressed i-infinite questions on this subject from your clients. So here's my question for you, Michael. Search behavior is changing fast. How are patients actually using AI, like ChatGPT and Google's AI Answers, to find and choose a dentist now? And I'll add to that, what data is sort of being pulled by the LLM when they're responding to that dental search prompt? Hmm. So many good questions in there. Um, so first of all, I think, you know, I've been doing this for 13 years, and Google has always been that top player. Um, for years, you know, 98% of search results were all focused around Google, and in the last year and a half to two years, we've seen that change for the first time ever. And so today, the numbers that we're seeing are about 80% of search happens through Google and 20% now happens through ChatGPT, and that is a big deal. So it's definitely changing the way that we explore the world, and I think most of us feel that in our own life. I certainly am using tools like ChatGPT more and more to figure out how I'm gonna plan a trip, to answer medical questions, to really figure a lot of things out in my life. So we're definitely seeing our behaviors change. When I know my parents are using ChatGPT to search for things, that's when I know there's a big shift happening. Um, with that said- When it comes to the baked-in behaviors we have, I think we're still seeing a lot of patients resort back to the things that have been comfortable for them. So when it comes to the practice and tracking where people come from and the digital marketing tracking we do, um, we're seeing a smaller impact on the AI front today. I don't think that's gonna stay that way, but right now Google is still king. We're still seeing most people come through Google. Um, the question most people have is, "Well, how do I rank for ChatGPT or for any of these tools?" And the surprising answer, and the unsatisfactory answer, is a lot of it is doing the things you already should have been doing, right? You need to make sure you claim your listings, Google My Business, and all of the other listings like Healthgrades that are out there, and make sure all the information is filled out correctly. You need to have good reviews. You need to have a good website that has deep information that actually speaks about you. It's not stock content. So all of these fundamental things make a huge difference, and in an unsatisfactory way, most of the time we wanna find something new and shiny, and we don't wanna go back and focus on the things we already know we're supposed to do. That is the first thing to do if you want to rank for ChatGPT and some of these new AI search tools. All right. I'm gonna butt in and ask a question on this one. This is an extension of the question. Um, if content-- You're-- What you're saying is this essentially the same, as of today, the same things that drove Google results before are driving AI results today, if I understood you right.So the question that I have then is, i-increasingly, content is being generated by AI itself. Is AI prioritizing non-AI-generated content? I suspect AI w- is and will become better at understanding AI-generated content that isn't nuanced, perhaps for a specific vendor or product, uh, and original content. In other words, how much time should the doctors put in original content versus easily created AI content? That's a great question. I, I think the nuance is in how you create any content, right? So before AI, you could have a team in India write content for you, and you could churn content out all day long. Um, that was lower quality content Today you can go to ChatGPT or Claude and you can say, "Write me a dental blog about dental implants," and it'll give you something. Um, where it gets way more powerful is when you talk to it and you say, "Interview me, ask me questions, let me talk to you and tell you how I
say things." That's where AI becomes incredibly powerful. And so I'm a big believer that AIcontent should not be relegated to some secondary category where, well, it's AI, it's too general. It's, it's how you're using it that's making it that way. You can have AI be an incredibly good copywriter, an incredibly good marketing thought leader, an incredibly good, you know, financial support tool, an incredibly good coach support tool. These things exist. It's how you use them and the infrastructure that exists behind it. So we do not see today that AI is, um, deprioritizing AI-written content. It's just looking for good content. And Google has come out, and keep in mind with Google they have Gemini, so they have their own AI tool. Um, they've come out and said that they're not going to penalize AI content. That was one of the first things they said a year and a half ago. And we have seen that play out. So I think that you can use AI to really, um, get a marketing edge if you do it the right way. But if you're lazy about it and you just take the first thing that's given to you, you don't revise it, and then you complain about the quality, yeah, it's, it's not gonna be, it's not gonna be sufficient. Do you think when, uh, pay per click and Google came on the scene and those early adopters of s- uh, pay, pay for search results, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. I, I've heard this from a lot of people back in the day that at that time the, the, the early people who took advantage of the Google mechanism won big. And then eventually everybody was doing it and it, um, uh, it diffused the benefit individually. It still may work, but not nearly as potent as in the first few years. Do you think we're in an era right now where there's this moment to capitalize in this unexplored, the unexplored West that everyone's trying to get out there and, and claim their land? Do you think that's happening right now with AI in that there will be some people who leverage AI to dramatically get ahead? Undoubtedly, whenever we have new platforms that have lots of eyeballs on it, the first adopters and people that figure out how to get into those platforms and be visible benefit greatly. I do think AI will be a little different, though. Um, with Google, you know, it was a little bit simpler. So for example, with Google Ads, you could come out and say, "I wanna show up if someone's searching for dental implant." And if you're the only person doing that, you always show up. What's unique about AI is it's tailoring its results, right? So everyone kind of has their own personalized ecosystem and experience, and that is a very, very unique thing. So I think it'll be a little harder to have those huge waves, those huge bumps that we saw with platforms like Google or Instagram or TikTok. Um, but there's no question that if you can position yourself well, um, and you are a dominant brand in your market, as we shift into a new, um, search paradigm, people that are showing up consistently across different search results are going to see a boost in their business. So it's, it is, it's, it's a bit of a gold rush. You should really look at this seriously, you should prioritize it, and you should make sure that you're asking good questions of your marketing team to say, "How are we gonna be at the front end of this, not on the back end of it?" I'm genuinely curious about the relationship between the way search results were before with all the links, right? You search, you got all the links on the first page. Very few people go to the second page, so you, you had to land on that first page. Are the people who are landing at the first page organically because of all the content that they had created and sort of leveraged the Google algorithms, are those the same people that are therefore gonna show up on the AI search at the top now? Since it seems to me people are l-less and less scrolling past the Google AI explanation at the top down to the links. So is it the same thing driving who's at the top of both of those? There's always been a lot of factors, right? This is one of the challenges. So y-you could look at website content and blog content. We call these on-site signals. You could look at how fast a website loads. You could then go and look off page at Google My Business and reviews and what, what sort of categories or services are there. You could also go look at what other people are saying about this business. Those are called backlinks. So are people linking back to this website? All these signals get tangled together, and, you know, anyone that's looked at their market will say, "Why is this person above me? They've got a terrible website." Um, it may be the reviews, maybe they bought that website domain 25 years ago. So what's interesting about your question is that Google has had its algorithm, and of course, it's probably gonna play towards the things that they care about, like Google reviews and, you know, website speed I like to think about ChatGPT and, and AI search this way. In the past, we would go to a library, we would ask a librarian, "Where is this book?" And they'd tell us, "Oh, it's over, you know, on this shelf." And you'd go and you'd pick the book up, and then you'd find a page and you'd read it. That's how the internet used to work. Today, we go to a librarian and you say, "Hey, can you answer this question?" And they know every page of every book, and they give you the answer. So it's a very different system. Um, I think to answer your question, generally there's gonna be overlap. If you were performing well in Google, you should have some good things happening for you when it comes to ChatGPT. Um, but that's not the only thing that's gonna get you there. You need to go back to those fundamentals. I think everyone should go look at their website again and say, "Is this story really good here? Am I really talking about the services? Am I really differentiating myself?" If you do those things, it's going to, it's gonna help you in the long run. Awesome. All right, let's dive into the operational side. So pa- patients are finding you. You're getting more sort of, um, AI-ified in your marketing efforts, and now they start to, to come in. So, um I wanna ask Megan, when a patient shows up having already done the research, and with AI maybe they're coming more informed, not only on the doctor, but they might be coming back more informed on what procedures they might need, why they're feeling pain a certain way in their, their molar or what-whatever that is. Um, so they're already researched f- uh, them through the AI. How is that patient different, uh, by the time they reach the front desk? Well, Michael mentioned it, you know, AI is the new Google it, right? So the same way Uber replaced the taxi, patients were not going backwards. So they're gonna walk in with a script already in their head, and they've asked ChatGPT or Grok, you know, what a crown should cost, whether they actually need it, what to be skeptical of, and now they're uploading even their own X-rays. And they're uploading photos, and they're asking AI, you know, "Should I do this?" And so they're not blank. They're, they're preloaded, and I think what that does is it means we have to be even more anti-fragile in our approaches with humans, and we have to be prepared. And so this is making us stronger in some ways, but it's making us more susceptible, and it's going to expose our weaknesses and our inabilities to, uh, deliver conversations or messages. So we have to be prepared. Um, they're checking, they're running the recommendation through AI, and if a doctor doesn't have critical thinking skills and that patient's prepped for this conversation, uh, the patient's gonna smell it, right? They're gonna notice that the doctor can't think on their toes or that they don't know. And so as doctors are using AI to learn about how to answer questions or teams are, you're not gonna have time in that face-to-face moment to type into, to your AI agent, "What should I say?" You know? So you still need to know your information. Um, but over time, I think it, it's gonna, you know, it's, it's gonna either build trust if you have strong foundations or it's going to silently erode that trust. And the patient won't say it out loud, but they're gonna stop coming back and you won't know why. Uh, this week in practices, I see it all the time, you know, uh, an X-ray. We have Pearl, we have Overjet in these offices, and the doctors ignore them, you know? They don't use it or they disagree with it, and yet they're paying, what? $400 a month for this subscription, and they haven't thought through, "What is my treatment philosophy? What do I truly believe determines when I intervene on a, a tooth?" But when I take those same X-rays and I throw them into ChatGPT and I, I say Think about this. If I'm a patient, should my dentist have recommended anything? And it said yes. It knew better than the doctor, you know? So I, I think we really have to have a strong foundation and, and clarity on what we want and build our systems after that. I, I like what Megan's saying here, and, and my advice is I, I, I see a lot of people that are weary or wary of AI and, and that makes sense. It's new. But I think if you take the position quickly to say, "Oh," you dismiss it, I think you will lose people because too many people are having an experience where they say, "This is providing value to me." And we also like the things we can control. And so I think you need to find a way to integrate AI into the chair- to-chair conversations. It's… People are gonna be curious. They are going to come with these questions and, and for me it's like, "Hey, it's great that you're so curious. There's some good things here. Let me take a step back." But with that in mind, Wes, I have a question for you. Um, we're all dealing with this, and I imagine the financial space and the planning space is not… You know, I can go and say, "Hey, what are the best stock picks today? How should I invest my money?" It's gonna give me an answer. What are you seeing, um, and, and, you know, is AI just gonna plan our wealth for us in the future here? Is it gonna read our P&Ls for us? How are you approaching this with your clients? Yeah, great, uh, great question. And by the way, uh, I have to sort of magnify your, your comment there earlier that patients don't wanna be dismissed with their AI-driven questions that, you know, they come with. If they are dismissed, th- that's a huge trust loss right there. Huge. Um, I have developers for a technology I have, and I keep bringing up AI, "Are you using AI to code?" And they're like, "A- AI's not there yet." They literally told me that last week. I hope they don't listen to this podcast. And it's making me highly question them and whether I wanna stay with them. I'm cutting big checks to them. If they're not using AI to be more efficient and then maybe share that efficiency across us, I re- it really makes me question their intent with me, and I think patients may feel that same way Okay. Let me answer your question, Michael. So I'm reading this book, for those of you on YouTube, you can see it. It's by the founder of a venture capital firm called, um, Conscious Capital, a guy named Lawrence Ford. And Conscious Capital is sort of what the name sounds, which is somebody investing money for their clients with a purpose-driven approach, trying to be conscious about how that money is affecting our economy, uh, uh, c- customers, our, our lives. And he just wrote this really profound book that's slightly philosophical called "The World Doesn't Need You," and then it crosses out the N and the T on doesn't. In other words, the world does need you still, and it's titled "The End of Work: Reclaiming Purpose in the Age of AI." And I'm just gonna quote one section in here that I think is relevant t- to answering your question. I'm, I'm, I'm sort of zooming out, Michael, and, and starting at kind of a, a philosophical view, and then I'm gonna come into the financial question. Does that sound good? Uh, in the book, he, he says there's a difference between knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom. And knowledge, he says, is additive. Knowledge is I gained one more layer of information, one more data point. And the AI machines are creating, um, a legion, all of us, of very effective data- retrieving machines. That's what we're becoming very good at, and our kids are becoming remarkable at retrieving data. It's so easy, and you don't necessarily need to go pay big bucks to retrieve data anymore. So that's knowledge. Knowledge i- is additive. Intelligence is adaptive. And so I think of intelligence as AI plus critical thought on top of that. It's adaptive, it's nuanced, it can think through the grays, it can start to think through application. And intelligence is still monetizable. It's still valuable. It's still critical to the equation of applied knowledge. And then the last one, and this is where AI is really creating a whole new, um- kind of revolution or phase for humanity, as he would say, is, is wisdom. And wisdom… AI is not creating wisdom. It gives us information to help us level up from knowledge to intelligence to wisdom. Wisdom is the top of the pyramid and will become the top of the pyramid. And wisdom is interactive. It's, it's, uh, integrative. That's the word he uses. It's integrative. And the integrative there is how do you bring together all of these data points that you were able to retrieve and then think through, i.e. intelligence, and then start to apply in a way that is very tailored to the need and the context of the user's life and why they're seeking that understanding. So with that in mind, let me come now to my world of finance, of accounting and tax and investment management and financial planning. Doctors are coming to me having researched what is the R&D tax credit, for example. They've come
to me, researched what are the tax deductions in the one big beautiful bill that apply to a dentist. They're coming to me with these things. What is the Augusta Rule where you rent your house to you personally? And so they're, they're more informed and they're showing up knowing some of the language. It's almost like going and
doing a bunch of research on WebMD and then you go to your doctor. That's happening so much more these days, which means we have to be on our game. We have to be able to answer these intelligently. Now, every one of these things we've already addressed a lot in the past, so that's not, that's not really a problem. But, um, it is, "Okay, doc, you've got your P&L, you've got budgets, you've got debt, you've got a tax projection, you have your personal financial goals, you have kids, you have a different philosophy on money in your life and money in how you're gonna educate your kids." There's a soft dynamic to what we all do, and there's absolutely a soft dynamic to money and people's relationship with their money. And I think that this high level, this wisdom, is where, where my focus is today with my team, is how do I help them become better coaches, better mentors, better embodied therapists almost around money? And the behavioral side of money is becoming increasingly more important
because in time, as I AI-ify aspects of my business, it's going to require less from me to get the tax return done. Uh, I think P&Ls are gonna be automatically done on a daily basis and just fed to a dashboard instead of a monthly PDF upload. I think it's gonna be much more r- the data flows, the data channels and piping
is gonna all become automated. And so then what is our value? It's the embodied experience with a client. And we now require our CFOs to hold a certain number of face-to-face meetings with their clients every year, otherwise their compensation is reduced. That face time, I think is, is actually becoming more important because that's where we address the integrativeness, the application of it, and we address the non-quantifiable aspects of money, like people's risk tolerance and how money is affecting their marriage, and how money is affecting their kids' view on, on life and, and, and, and launching into the world. So I would say the nature of the conversations is, is being forced to, to, to be altered to things that are more about purpose, um, direction, and the, uh,
psychological aspects of money. All right. So that's on me. Any follow-up questions on that one? Oh, it's the same in my work. I mean, right? Like, you can type in what is your SOP in a practice, yet The root of that SOP is founded on someone's own experience, so it's only that doctor's level of knowledge through their point of
view. And so if ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or whoever they're working with is only getting that filter and, you know, you as a financial advisor, Michael as a, a marketing advisor, me as an operations advisor, we're asking the tougher, deeper-rooted questions to say like, "Well, how did you get to this to be your SOP? What are we missing here? What's the belief system that this is built on, and is that truly aligned?" You know, just like Michael said, going back reading your website, does it still say who you are as a practice? Because sometimes we diverge from where we started or we evolve, and I, I think like that's where the depth comes in, and then the accountability, right? You can have a trainer, but, you know, you actually show up and go to them. Claude can write me a workout. That's not a problem. It's will I do it? Can I do it? What are my own, you know, humanistic barriers and narratives in my mind that are preventing me from achieving that? But that's where the human connection really helps someone, 'cause the same will be true with patients and robots, right? Yeah. Megan, I, I think you nailed it. Uh, like I, I, I love this analogy. I've been using the one, uh, about getting my hair cut, right? I can go buy scissors. I can watch a YouTube video. I still go to a barber. Uh, this knowledge has existed
forever. In fact, all AI is doing is it's giving us this stuff immediately, more quickly, and in a tailored way. But the, the health one is such a great one, right? Diet, exercise. How many of us have had a coach personally give us a diet, say, "If you just do this, you're gonna hit the goals that you want. If you just work out in this way, you're gonna hit the goals that you want." And what's the blocker? Was the plan the blocker? Should the pl- like, no, it's, it's the execution, I think. So at the end of the day, the sad thing about AI adoption, I think, is going to be, um, in a confronting way, our human apathy, our, um, uh, we all get tired, we all get distracted. These are the things that are gonna ultimately bring us right back to where we are today. And I think the, the burden for us is we in our businesses, like Wes said, say, "I need to compress the busy work, the things that don't bring joy to the team I
have, that don't really add value." We have to do these things and create more space to be more excellent, and I think that is really where AI is gonna create huge opportunity. It's gonna create more space to be more excellent. The bar is gonna continue to get raised. I, I just, I, I just actually wanna pin on this a little bit longer. The, the bridge between knowledge and action is not being closed by AI. It's just staging that relationship to be more efficient, perhaps, at least in the onset. But in everything we do, Michael, you around marketing and how they approach the market, the interactions, the human experience. You, Megan, a ton of human experience. What's the biggest expense on the doctor's P&L? It's labor, it's people. It, it is people. And, um, I, I don't envision a place where I feel the same level of accountability to accomplish something when the accountability is imposed on me by the AI or determined by the AI. Like, "Okay, Wes, we're gonna get-- we're gonna-- you're gonna lose five pounds over the next month." "Great, Claude. Thank you." And Claude gives me my plan. What accountability do I actually feel in that relationship? Now, the scary thing is psychosis is real. People are having certain relationships with their AI, but they're having relationships of like, I don't know, therapy sessions a little bit. I don't think it's creating accountability. I also think that as much as I read a book and I feel motivated, and I've read 1,000 business books, my one-hour, once-a-week meeting with my business coach is worth 10 of those books
because of the way that we think through that wisdom aspect, that, that integrative aspect to it, that soft aspect to it cannot be replaced, in my opinion. And I think the embodied experience is gonna be increasingly more important. I just think everything underneath the embodied experience that leads up to the sort of X-ray, so to speak, with data, I think that whole thing is gonna be changed dra-dramatically I wanna, I wanna add to that. I, I think there's the moment we're in and the moment we're going towards, and, and I'm someone that will say up and down, we talk as a team here, I feel there is a tsunami coming for all of us, and I think the world is gonna change dramatically. And it's, it's a, it's a quiet droning alarm out there, and I think a lot of us are gonna resist it and say, "Well, you know, no one can replace my front desk, and like AI can't answer the phones and, you know, uh, uh, AI can't hold me accountable." I, I wanna give you a hu- a, a fun story. So Nat Friedman, who is I believe the CEO of GitHub, uh, connected his, uh, Claude bot that he made to his home camera system, and his, his, uh, AI friend decided that he was very dehydrated, and so he started to message him and say, "You're really dehydrated." And then it said, "Go to the kitchen and drink some water. I'm watching you. I can see where you are in the cameras." And then he went and he drank the water, and then his AI bot sent him a photo from the camera of himself drinking the water and said, "Good job." And he said, "You know, I, I actually felt like I did a good job." So I just wanna point out that there's the moment we're in, and there's the moment we're heading towards, and I think there's some uncanny valley things that we will experience in our lifetime that, uh, if we were to listen to this podcast 15 years from now, uh, it, it might be confronting. Yeah. You know, in this book what it talks about, he, he, he says And I, I really agree with what the thesis of this book is, which is AI isn't just another tech innovation. It, it's like it is a inflection point in the evolution of our species. And he talks a little bit about it being closer to like the, the advent of fire. And fire, which can destroy a forest and, and kill people, uh, and it can also… It also changed everything, the way that they were able to cook and build. And because of fires, we had the combustible engines. And everything that came out of the ability to spark and create that energy from, from fuel, whatever source of fuel that is, that fire, it, uh, probably changed the human experience more than any other advent, uh, in history. From fire, we s- could start to shape tools, and from tools we have skyscrapers and that whole sequence of things. That's, that's the metaphor for what AI is going to do. This book goes so far to
say that when robotics and AI merge here in the next 10 to 20 years, the physical labor… Right now it's the knowledge economy that's being eroded from AI. Not eroded, it's being dramatically altered. It's what, what all three of us do, which is managing knowledge. However, there's the, there's the manual economy of plumbers and welders and construction people. That economy will change likely eventually when robotics gets to the point where it can do what humans do with our hands and our bodies. This is why, like Facebook is tracking the point and click of all of their employees. This is why in China they have people wearing cameras in the factories to see
how the hands are, are, are working the assembly line. Everyone is trying to create these brains, these LLMs, gathering the most data, 'cause it's like, um, it, it, it's like the network effect. Whoever gets there first Wins. Why? With Airbnb, I'm not gonna go to any other place than Airbnb most likely 'cause it's got all the inventory, i.e. all the data. And so whoever gets all the data first to f- to feed the most effective LLM, which does, does the job most effectively, they're gonna be hard to compete with. Hence, you have unbelievable amounts of money going into
these AI companies. The valuations on these things… So Mike, going back a little bit to your question about the financial implication of portfolio analysis, look at, like l- l- let's look at, um, SpaceX just about to do its IPO. I think SpaceX's, um, revenue is around, if I recall, 17 billion. It might be 25 billion, but it's right around there. You know, Starlink and Claude and SpaceX, they're all, they're all the same company, and that's about what it's, what it's
doing in revenue. They're coming out of the gates with a $1.5 trillion valuation. Just to put things in perspective, usually you're getting maybe four to five to six times revenue. I, I don't, I don't even know the math on that, but it is unbelievably high. So the, so my thought on that is with a lot of these companies like NVIDIA All the tech companies that have AI, all of them, are they incredibly powerful? Yes. Are they incredibly, um, uh, changing? Yes. Are they incredibly overvalued? Yes. A- all of those things, yes. We just don't know to what extent
the valuations are gonna be monetized through growth of revenue and a growth of profit. And right now, everybody's banking that, uh, these AI companies are going to go past the universe into other solar systems with their revenue. I mean, in order to justify the amount of investment going into these companies, the growth on these things would require that essentially they consolidate tons of industries and consolidate a lot of GDP in our country to flow through them in order to justify their valuations right now. It's utterly insane. And so what we do is we don't invest in S&P index funds anymore because 35% to 40% of the returns are in seven companies, and you're losing diversification effect because of that. And so we're still investing in those companies, but not to the same proportion as the indexes would have us do. And so we sort of flatten that out a little bit, and we're really still sticking with a lot of our old, stodgy, unsexy, dividend-paying, boring companies like, like Warren Buffett, because these ones are tried and true, provable businesses with a sustainable model and, and brand. And the other stuff has a lot of momentum and hype that's just really hard to quantify. All right. I feel like I was up on a soapbox there. We should, uh, conclude this one. Let's go a-ahead around and everyone just end off with a, a quick statement of how, how, uh, one piece of advice that you would have for a dentist as they're answering the question in their head: "What should I do about AI in my business? What should I do about AI in my practice?" And, um, Megan, if you're okay, why don't we start off with you? AI is not new. We've been using it. CEREC's been doing it, SprintRay's doing it, Dental Intel's been taking data, spitting it back at you. Um, yet the common
theme always around all those companies that have existed for decades is it's not always accurate. And instead of asking why, dentists just skip over and think it's a tech company. So the practices that will win with AI are going to be the practices that understand how to ask the right questions about their foundations, you know? Like it's not gonna be the best tech stack, it's gonna be the ones that have the cleanest inputs, the cleanest, the most clear understanding, and, uh, a team that has trained humans to understand that also. So if you're using the, the AI and the tech to maximize your efficiency and to be able to maximize your human touch is, is where you're gonna win. Nice. Michael? You know, we talked about this in another episode, but I would come back and say that, you know, the best clients we have are ones that come to us and they've actually tried to do a little marketing on their own. They say, "I, I tried to build a website. This is what I learned." Um, I think for you guys, a lot of times the best client's gonna be one that comes and says, "I've tried to write SOPs. I've, I've-- I care about this. It's important to me. I've spent time on it, and I get that I need help." And so for me, my best advice is to have a personal experience with AI. Don't just plug in and, and let you know another software tell you, "Okay, we've plugged AI into this." You need to get a, an account, pay some money to Claude or ChatGPT, and build a project for yourself. Try to build a website, try to build your SOPs, um, build a financial calculator, whatever it is. And I think if you stay up late a few nights and you have an experience, and you keep pushing it further, right? Maybe at first you say, "Build me a marketing plan." And then at the end of that you say, "Hey, I see this section on social media. Can you write my social media captions? Wow. Can you give me scripts to, to read for those videos? Wow." And you keep pushing and it goes further and further. That's where things will unlock for you, and that's where you'll get a better appreciation for how this tool can be used, not just by you, but for you. And I think I'll close with this thought. It's important that you understand the power of this moment so that you can hold other people accountable. I like going back to Wes. Wes, I'll give you an answer. We have a software team here. They're using AI every day. We have a software team of three. We're about to be a four. They're doing the work of probably 10 to 15 software developers, uh, about two to three years ago. Um, so knowing that helps you make decisions and work with the partners that you have. But Wes, bring us home. I, I, I want to hear from your perspective, what should doctors be thinking about and doing? You got it. Number one is don't ignore it. Please just don't ignore this. You, you can't think this is a passing thing. That's, that's number one. In which case, what does that mean? Learn it. I think AI is democratizing things that in, in the past you had, you had to rely on somebody el- else with a certain knowledge base to, to do certain things. So that's, that's number one. Learn it. Get a subscription of Claude. Check out Claude Cowork. Play around with Claude Code. Take some courses on this. I, I, I don't think everyone needs to become AI, um, consultants to themselves. I wouldn't say that, but I think that they should learn enough of it so that they can speak intelligently about it as they work with other AI professionals helping them adopt it in their system. The next thing I will say is, what I'm doing is we just got done, we, we paid a lot of money to a consultant to help us, um, create all of our SOPs throughout our company. And you can't build agentic processes, agentic being a process that is done by agents as opposed to humans. You can't build agentic processes without having those processes clearly delineated first. It's like the architect's blueprint. And so what we're doing is we're blue- we just got done blueprinting all of our processes here at Practice CFO, and my accounting department is like the master bedroom, and my financial planning department is like the guest bedroom. And we're gonna go one by one, and we're gonna look at how AI can do the stuff that our clients don't care about. How we code transactions in QuickBooks, how we reconcile, s- how we get data into our Excel spreadsheets. Clients don't care about that. They care about the product and the conversation and the application. And so, uh, do your SOPs, hire Megan, get them all laid out, then start to layer on AI processes in a prioritized manner across, across of them. And the last thing I'll say is, I think that doctors, um, don't wanna lose the human aspect as they do that. I'm finding that some companies are jumping too quickly to the robot and the automation without understanding how important that human connection still is. I think over the past 30 years, uh, uh, dentists ha- are confronting increasingly competition. And if you go back before tech and DSOs, it was largely hang up your shingle and you're probably good. Then tech came in, online marketing, reviews, DSOs come on the scene, and suddenly there's a lot more competition and doctors have to know how to run a business. I think AI is another inflection point of competition. I think it's gonna increase competition within their industry. And that's why I say you can't ignore this thing. You've got to use it to your benefit, otherwise it's gonna use you to somebody else's benefit. Thanks, team. We really only got through half of the section. I think we'll probably do a part two on this, uh, where we talk about AI experience as it relates to overhead, um, a little bit more operational, uh, items on here. So this is such a great subject. Thank you for joining. Until next time, everybody.