The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry – Episode 181

Meet Annie: Dentistry’s Most Advanced AI Agent.

Adrian Lefler, CEO of My Social Practice, details this innovative artificial intelligence solution specifically designed for the dental industry.

Adrian discusses:

  • Training ‘Annie AI’ on your group’s processes
  • Integration with your PMS
  • Traditional call center challenges
  • Much more

To learn more about Annie AI visit https://mysocialpractice.com/annie-ai/

You can also contact Adrian Lefler at adrian@mysocialpractice.com

If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube

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Meet Annie: Dentistry’s Most Advanced AI Agent. Full Group Dentistry Now DSO Podcast Transcript:

Welcome to the Group Dentistry Now show, the voice of the DSO industry. Kim Larson and Bill Neumann talk to industry leaders about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. Visit groupdentistrynow.com for more DSO analysis, news, and events. Looking for a job or have a job to fill? Visit joindso.com. We hope you enjoy today’s show.

Bill Neumann: Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate you watching us. And I’m really happy to have this guest here. He’s a good friend of Group Dentistry Now. And I’ve known Adrian Leffler for quite a while. He’s opened my eyes to a lot of things when it comes to marketing with dental practices and DSOs. And it’s really a pleasure to have Adrian on the show. He is the CEO of My Social Practice. Adrian, welcome. Thank you. It’s nice to be here, Bill. Yeah, great to have you. It’s going to be fun to do this. Adrian and his team have helped group dentistry now quite a bit on our website with SEO and some development work that they’ve done. Just some interesting things that happen when you’re on a website. So I always appreciate that. So if you kind of wonder what goes on behind the scenes, it’s not quite as easy as it always appears on the outside. So we appreciate what you, Adrienne, and your team have done for group dentistry now as we’ve been as we’ve been growing up and understanding how things evolve when you have websites, not just a media website, but when you have a dental practice website, or you have multiple locations where you’re managing 10, 15, 20, 100 different websites for different practices in your DSO. So, Adrian, maybe a little bit about your background. You’ve been in dental marketing for a while. And then tell us a little bit about what my social practice does.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah, well, thanks for the introduction, Bill. And we love working with you guys, too, you and your lovely partner. So my social practice, we got started in dental marketing back in 2009. And, um, it was a kind of a weird thing. We just kind of landed in dentistry and we were, we launched a social media service, which is why we called ourselves my social practice. Um, and for the first few years, that’s really the only service that we really focused on. We, we weren’t doing any, website development. At that point, we weren’t doing ads. We weren’t doing anything with reputation management or graphic design or SEO or anything like that. It was really just kind of we were a social media marketing company. We were kind of the first company and I would say probably the first company in the medical industry that really developed a specific marketing campaign and strategy for for dentists. I hadn’t seen anything in any of the other marketplaces, any of the other specialties or other medical specialties. So we were super, super early. And we kind of rode the Facebook wave when Facebook was kind of cool. And we rode the Twitter and the Instagram wave and the TikTok wave. But over the years, what happened is We just had a lot of clients asking us to do other stuff for them. So we ended up adding lots of other services. So pretty much now we, we do really anything that’s a digital marketing, uh, strategy for, for dentists. We, um, we stayed in the dental industry. We really only work with dentists. And part of that is because, um, well, when you develop a social media strategy, a digital marketing strategy, and you develop it specifically for an industry, it doesn’t always translate to another industry. So when you’re starting to develop ideas and concepts and marketing campaigns and tools and things like that, it’s not like you can take that stuff and just like jump into the say optometry industry and it won’t translate. It may seem like it could, right, because it’s all medical, but the reality of it is the relationship between the dental practice and their patient is very different and the way that between dentistry and say optometry or Cairo or dermatology. So, um, we had just, we got kind of locked in and in the beginning we thought, Oh, this is a problem, right? We’re not going to be able to scale across multiple industries. But what we realized over time was that it was actually a super big benefit to stay in dentistry. We have come to really understand dentists. We understand the struggles of a dental practice, the team dynamics. We understand the marketplace. We understand what works and what doesn’t work in terms of any type of a digital marketing strategy. And so we’ve just kind of found a home here in dentistry and we really appreciate our dental clients. You know, I never thought that in, I never thought that I’d be working in the dental industry. If you’d asked me, if you’d asked me to guess, you know, a 10,000 guesses as to what I’d be doing in my, in my career, this would have never popped up. So it’s just been really kind of an interesting niche, but we love the industry and we just feel very comfortable in it. We’ve spent years learning how to streamline processes, get the right team members, develop the right type of content, enhance and improve our customer service and our relationships with our clients. And we know a lot of people in the industry, too. So we have a lot of great relationships like you. Right. So anyway, that’s kind of how we got started. I don’t know. Did you want any other follow up questions to that?

Bill Neumann: No, I think that I think that’s great. I know you also do quite a bit of speaking. In fact, I I believe the first time I met you was at an event that you held in Utah and you had quite a big stage presence there, but you speak at a lot of different events as well, right? Whether it’s webinars or you do live events.

Adrian Lefler: I remember that event and I wanted to talk with you and I didn’t know how to get you to talk with me and so I offered to buy you some beer.

Bill Neumann: And that worked.

Adrian Lefler: And that worked, and look at us now.

Bill Neumann: There you go.

Adrian Lefler: If I remember, it was an IPA that you were in. I probably should have said that.

Bill Neumann: No, that’s fine. That’s perfect. That’s exactly right. I bring that up because I remember meeting you for the first time, and the event that you put on, and uh, the presentation and I know you’re, um, you just do, I was just kind of watching a webinar you just did with, uh, or a podcast you just did on YouTube a couple of days ago, or at least it was just posted up on YouTube a couple of days ago. They do a lot of podcasts and webinars and presentations.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah, I do. I do a ton of speaking. I’m actually, I’m actually speaking like six times in September. I’m going to be gone the whole month. It’s pretty crazy. So, um, And that’s just kind of happened over the years as we’ve gotten become known in the industry. And I think we’re seen as a fairly reliable, long term company. We’re not planning on selling the company or not. You know, we’re not we’re not like a SAS company where we’re going to raise a hundred million dollars and sell out and get out, you know, be nice to do that. But that’s not who we are. And so we just plan on growing, continue to grow the company and whatnot. But We’ve just become known really well to have great, and I’m kind of bragging a bit here, but our presentations, I say ours, myself, I do most of the speaking. My business partner, Seth Dally, also does some speaking. But our presentations are really pretty entertaining. So we get asked to come back all the time. So yeah, I’m gonna be speaking quite a bit. this this year and um October, I’ve got a couple speaking gigs. November, I’ve got a couple and um you know, it’s fun. It’s fun to try one out. You know, I have four kids and and they’re all kind of up and out of the house now and a few years ago when when I was speaking, I would get really kind of kind of depressed when I would leave and go and speak because I wanted to miss my kids but now that they’re gone and they don’t care to really have anything to do with me other than bug me for money. Um you know, traveling is ki

Bill Neumann: Yeah, no, I understand that with the kids being out of the house. So, yeah, it’s a little easier to travel for sure. Well, so as things evolved, you kind of started things off with writing the Facebook wave and the social media focus of the company. And then how you’ve evolved is customers really requested more and more services. They needed more things. So you build out a team, a more robust, broader offering. And so now that takes us to the topic of conversation today, really seems to be the topic of everybody’s conversation today, which is AI, but specifically the AI that we’re going to talk about in a product that you’ve developed at my social practice. It’s, well, you call it Annie. So it’s coined as dentistry’s most advanced AI agent. So why don’t you talk a little bit about, you know, what anti-AI is and then what led you to bring AI, you bring it really in as an offering and how does that kind of fit with what you do at my social practice?

Adrian Lefler: OK, yeah, well, first of all, This is a product, Annie is a product that’s been in development for about a year and a half. And it is a partnership. Well, we’re owners in the in the product, but the the company, it’s a separate company. So we’re doing the marketing and the advertising and we’re an investor in it. So to keep clear in terms of the ownership of this, it’s not fully owned by my social practice. Connor Ludlow, is the CEO of Annie, and is our partner in developing this and whatnot. So, but, but what the reason that we wanted to get into AI, when, when chat GPT launched chat GPT 3.0, which was a year and a half ago, almost two years ago, I think it was November of 2022 is when it launched. It just blew my mind. I think it blew everybody’s minds who was, you know, had their ear to the floor and was kind of watching what was going on. You know, we do a ton of copywriting. You know, we’re writing copy for our clients. We produce quite a bit of copywriting for my social practice, whether that’s blog posts or, you know, building new websites for dentists or writing blog posts for our clients or whatever it might be. They just do a ton of copywriting, got a whole copywriting team. And when we started playing with ChatGPT, we realized we could cut our copywriting expenses about half because it enabled the production cycle of copywriting to be like just incredibly condensed. With copywriting, the toughest part is coming up with a concept and an idea that makes sense, and then getting that first draft done. And with ChatGPT and other tools like that, it was, it just streamlined everything so, so well. So that got us kind of hooked on to using ChatGPT in writing our own, our own copy and copy for our clients. Now we don’t, we have some very precise ways in which we use it. We don’t just write something and then post it, we, we write it, we clean it up, we edit it, we SEO optimize it, and then we publish it. So there’s there are steps definitely to the process of, of using chat GPT, or any of the other large language models. But it was just, it was just kind of mind blowing. And after that, What happened is OpenAI, which owns ChadGBT, and Microsoft put $10 billion into this company. They opened up the access to the large language model and allowed other companies to start building products on top of it, or using the same artificial intelligence technology. And so there was a company called MidJourney, or there is a company called MidJourney, which is a graphic design. Oh, there’s my dog. Look at that. Okay. Dogs, people, dogs. Mid Journey is a graphic design image generation tool. And that blew my mind. And I actually started a channel called dental AI art. It’s a, it’s an Instagram channel. Matter of fact, I’ll, I’ll, give you the slide for a QR code on this, people can shoot it and go, go take a look at all the imagery we’ve created. But it’s basically just images for dentistry that are created by AI. And I kind of lost myself in, in how incredibly powerful the tool was for like a month. I was, you know, it would be Saturday night, and it would be like, oh, okay, it’s time to go out to dinner and hang out. And I’d be like, making stupid graphics, like gorillas at the dentist or tooth fairies or whatever, you know, I was just it was incredible. Anyway. So since then, there has been 100 billion dollars pumped into this industry. OK, and there are tools coming out daily that and I would say a lot of them will probably fizz out, you know, phase out and not be effective. But there is so much development going on. that it was obvious to see that tools will be developed that will enable businesses in order to scale and streamline and become more proficient at what they’re doing. And so I thought, after having my experience with ChatGPT, I thought, oh, well, the easiest thing to do here would be to take the large language model, ChatGPT, and build a web chat on it. Because the natural language processing of AI is freakishly good. You can’t tell that it’s not a human being, which is a little bit scary for people. But it’s just so good. And all of the chat products on the market are just junk. They’re seriously junk compared to generative AI. And so I thought, OK, we need to build a chatbot. So we started working on that and build a chat bot. Well, it’s not, we don’t even call it chat bot. We call it a web chat agent. It’s called Annie. And, um, it, it, it can be fine tuned to an infinite degree. Like you can dump in 10,000 page document about a practice, like every process. If you, we haven’t done that, but I mean, I’m just, I’m extrapolating here, but you can, train on as much information as you want. And it accesses that data and speaks naturally to to the person in chat. And it’s just like, so effective. And it’s so much more user friendly than a regular chat bot or some of the kind of the phone tree chat systems that are out there. It’s like you chat and it says, who are you here for? Are you an existing patient or a new patient? You have to click existing patient. And it says, all right, would you like to do this A, B, C, or D? And it forces you into a phone tree. That is like a, that’s gone. Like that model for communication will be eradicated within the next two or three years. There’s nobody that’s going to want to, there’s no, nobody enjoys using one of those systems. And generative AI, with building a large language model like this just gets rid of it. So that was the first thing that we developed. And then we thought, Oh, well, let’s just tie it to a phone system and put a voice on it. And so now we have a phone assistant that basically can answer the phone after hours, weekends, or you can turn your phones off and it’ll roll over or can ring three times and it’ll roll over. And then you get, you get 24 seven coverage by an AI agent who is better than a human being. I would bet that there’s just, I mean, outside of a team member answering the phone and, and being able to, uh, build the relationship. I mean, outside of that, there is not another solution in the marketplace that’s better than an AI phone assistant. So we launched a phone assistant that’s actually been launched this last week. So it’s, it’s brand spanking new matter of fact, um, I’ll give you a clip if you want to run a clip of the phone agent. I’ll let somebody listen to it. I’ll just record a call and you can throw it in here right here. So this is a this is a us calling the phone agent. It’s not an actual practice, but it’s a it’s the phone agent tied to a chat GPT, large language model, and it’s been trained about this this practice. So it’s like you’re talking to a human being.

undefined: Hello. Thanks for calling Smith Family Dental. How can I help you today?

undefined: Hey, do you guys take Cigna?

undefined: Yes, we are in network with Cigna. Would you like to schedule an appointment?

undefined: Yeah, I needed to get in for cleaning.

undefined: Great. Have you visited us before?

undefined: No, this would be my first time. I just barely moved here.

undefined: No worries. Let’s get you set up. Can I have your full name and date of birth, please?

undefined: Yes, it’s Tyler Anderson.

undefined: Thanks, Tyler. Can you also provide your date of birth?

undefined: Yes, it’s January 27th, 1997.

undefined: Thank you, Tyler. Can I also get your phone number and email address to complete the booking?

undefined: Yeah, it’s 801-913-1198. And then my email is tyler.anderson97 at gmail.com.

undefined: Thank you. Now, do mornings or afternoons typically work best for you?

undefined: Do you have anything in the afternoon next week?

undefined: Let me check our schedule for next week. How about Monday at 2 o’clock, Tuesday at 3 o’clock, or Wednesday at 1 o’clock?

undefined: Do you have anything a little bit later on Tuesday?

undefined: How about Tuesday at 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock?

undefined: Yeah, Tuesday at 5 would actually be perfect.

undefined: Great. Please confirm. We’re booking a cleaning on Tuesday, September 3rd at five o’clock PM.

undefined: Yeah, that’s right.

undefined: Great. Your appointment is all set for Tuesday at five o’clock PM. We look forward to seeing you then.

undefined: Awesome. And where, so where do I park when I show up?

undefined: Parking is available in the lot behind our building with additional street parking on second Avenue.

undefined: Awesome. Thank you.

undefined: You’re welcome. Have a great day and we’ll see you on Tuesday. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out.

Bill Neumann: One might be a specialty, one might not be a specialty. So how do you fine tune or how do you take that information and deliver it to Annie so Annie knows how to speak to the patients because they’re asking all different questions?

Adrian Lefler: So the large language models, without any fine tuning, actually can speak fairly well about dentistry. I mean, you can ask it general questions about dentistry. You could just go to chat GPT right now or Google Gemini, or there’s another product called perplexity, which is really great. Um, Claude is another one. They’re, they’re popping up all over the place. Now, these large language models, you can ask any of these large language models and they can speak highly intelligently, um, about dentistry. Okay. So just getting general information about dentistry is not a very deep, that’s just kind of built into the model. But that’s not sufficient for what needs to be done at the practice level. So what you do is you, the best way to explain is there’s just simply a layer that goes on top of the large language model that has additional information in it about the specific practice. So you can load in like bios on the doctors, bios on the team member, a history, like directions, like, um, Like Dennis always get a call like, I can’t, I don’t, where’s your practice? I can’t find it. Maybe it’s a Google map problem or whatever. And so they call in and you have to say, Oh, go down main street, hang a right on blah, blah, blah, to the big red building. And we’re on the left in the blah, blah, blah. I mean, it could do that. It can, you can tell it to speak in a natural human like way, how to find your office. It can, it has all the information on your insurances. Like you can load all that in who you accept, who you don’t accept. conditional acceptances, insurance acceptance, you can load in membership plans. A lot of doctors and practices will have membership plans for those patients who don’t have insurance. So in the chat or in the phone call, if the patient doesn’t have insurance, you can tell the AI agent to bring up the membership plan on the call, right? You can train it on deals, specials, I mean, Any information you’ve got basically so you’re basically layering this in on top of the large language model saying Okay, use the general information that you have about dentistry, but fine-tune it to all this additional information and then you give it basically Triggers here and there in order to tell it which way to go and it learns it actually the more it’s used the more that the model becomes better and So that’s that’s kind of how you do it without getting too geeky.

Bill Neumann: Okay. And you mentioned it earlier, you talked a little bit about, you know, it can be kind of scary with what it can do, right? What AI can do and maybe what potentially people feel like it could eliminate jobs, maybe in the industry or their job. So maybe talk a little bit about anti-AI and how that really is more of an assistant than a job killer.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah, I think there’s two big fears. One is about a year and a half ago when this stuff came out, everybody thought this is Terminator all over again. The robots are coming. I literally spoke a few places and people were freaked out that it was conscious. It was going to become take over the government, shut down all the electrical grid. I was hearing stuff like that. I was like, whoa, this is a little freaky. I think that AI is going to become ubiquitous in our daily life. We’re going to use it all the time. And I think that fear is quickly being dissipated. But the fear of job loss is a real fear. And we have to be very, very careful with our employees, not mine, but dentists and their employees, that that is not the intent, and it shouldn’t be the intent. Really what, well, let me back up. There will be some constriction in the labor market. There was a Columbia University School analysis of the Industrial Revolution, and the labor constriction in the Industrial Revolution was about 15% of the entire labor pool, right? So because jobs were being eliminated because production and streamlining and, and technology, basically about 15% of the entire market, you know, labor pool was out of work, constricted. They anticipate that it’ll be about 5% with AI, according to this article. So there will be some constriction in, in the market, or in the labor pool, I should say. But mostly, how it’s going to be used is it’s going to be used as a tool. There will be dentists who embrace AI and they may never get rid of an employee. Okay. But they’ll streamline processes so well that their profitability goes up. They’ll just have a simply an advantage. And then there’ll be dentists who don’t address, you know, don’t adopt the technology and they’ll be, they’ll be at a, uh, you know, they’ll be behind the eight ball, so to speak, because they won’t be able to be as profitable as other practices. So I’ll give you an example. Annie, I mean, outside of managing web chat and inbound phone calls. Right now, we’re, we’re working on several other things that we launched probably over the next several months, which is outbound dialing. So it can be make recall calls, patient follow up, you know, confirmation of appointments, insurance verification. It’ll, it’ll do all the data entry. Like if, if a patient calls in and they schedule an appointment, it’ll gather all the information for the patient forms on the call. Okay. Now these are not things that are available now, but they’re things that we’re working on. And so you can imagine like what happens to a front desk if, All of their phone calls in the after hours and the weekends are handled professionally. And the conversion rate is extremely high in terms of scheduling appointments using an AI tool. All calls at lunch, if they’re telling them to turn their phones off, go to this agent. Anything that’s three rings or more or two rings or more overflows to it. So now you have total coverage of your phones, right? Not only that, I’ve done my own investigation in the industry, in dental industry, and about 80% of dentists do not have web chat on their website. On the other hand, 62% of consumers prefer chat. And the reason that dentists don’t put chat on their website is because no one wants to manage it. It’s a freaking pain in the ass. Nobody wants to do it. It just gives another task to the front desk. So if that web chat is handled, not only do you have a better user experience on the website, probably get more appointments. You will get more appointments through the website. All your phone calls are covered. But then what about all your patient forms being taken care of insurance verification? Um, you don’t have the, uh, calls coming in while you’ve got a patient in front of you that you need to pay attention to. And then you got a call coming in and you got forms. I mean, all that stuff, all that data entry is going to be managed by AI. And what does that do for the practice? Well, it streamlines processes, and it’s a huge headache that you let go of, right? Now your team can focus on what’s important, which is building relationships with patients and paying attention to the person that’s in the office. And all this data entry stuff that nobody wants to do, it’s going to be totally managed, and it’s not going to ever screw up. It’ll be totally dialed in, mistake mostly mistake-free, but that’s where this is going. And so to your question of, well, people are worried about losing their jobs. I talked to an office manager last week about this. She says, I don’t want to have anything to do with AI because it undermines our patient relationships, right? The relationship with the practice and the patient. And in her tone and the subjective, kind of like undertone of what she was saying. She’s a little freaked out about her job, right? Like, are they going to hire robots and fire me kind of thing? That’s not what’s going to happen. AI is going to become your front desk’s best friend, and they’re not going to want to do their job without it because it’s going to take a huge load off their plate. So as soon as we can help people understand that, that that this is an efficiency tool where teams that leverage it frankly work better than, oh, no, we don’t want to touch this technology. We’re going to lose our job. We’ll be OK. And that’s the direction it needs to go. That’s the direction it will go as soon as you can educate dental teams, you know, beyond this knee jerk fear of like losing their job. OK, but it’s a it’s a real fear for sure.

Bill Neumann: You mentioned a little bit earlier, you talked about how it integrates with, well, you can, you can add in membership information, you can pretty much add in whatever you’d like and hours, whatever the specialties are, things like that. How does it integrate with practice management and patient management systems? And how does that, you know, how would that work? Because that’s important as well. You’ve already got some, some technology in place at these practices.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. So it does integrate with patient management systems. The way that we’ve built it is there’s what’s called an API, and I can’t even remember what it stands for, but it’s basically a connection point where you can take a piece of software and you can connect it to another piece of software. So Annie basically connects directly into the patient management system of the dental practice. And what that does is that gives the agent In a HIPAA compliant manner, by the way, okay, so it’s important that this is all HIPAA compliant So it’s all secure and whatnot. But what it does is it gives the agent access to the patient management system data so if I call and I get Annie on the phone and I’m having a conversation about maybe Scheduling or if I have a question about my insurance or whatever it might be It can access the data in the patient management system on the fly So it’ll recognize who I am. It has all my information. It has my you know All the information that’s in the patient management system is now accessible from Annie in an instant. So it can schedule appointments. We don’t have it yet that it can reschedule appointments, but that’s something that’s on the dev plan. It can notify the practice of the phone call that they’ve just had if there’s some issue or something like that that the agent couldn’t handle. But basically, without integration to the patient management system, it’s just a phone assistant that I think, you know, it’s just it’s not very valuable. What what what what needs to happen is you need to take a load of work off of your front desk, right? You want to, you know, offload things that can be done by AI that don’t need to be done by a human need to be offloaded to AI. And scheduling appointments, getting all the patient data and information, confirming the appointment, all that. Currently, right now, there’s, you know, there’s a ton of companies in the industry that all produce one system, you know, that like, for example, I shouldn’t name any companies, but there are companies that do appointment reminders, there are companies that do insurance verification, there are companies do this and do that. And, and you and you look at, you look at the cost that is accrued if you’re using all these different systems, all that can be managed by AI in one system. So basically, without integration of the patient management system, you can’t get all that work done. So that’s why it’s imperative that whatever the AI tool, at least in dentistry, it needs to be able to speak, upload information, download information, basically from the patient management system.

Bill Neumann: So let’s switch gears a little bit. And when we talk about Annie actually, you know, answering the phones, maybe compare that to what a lot of group practices or DSOs might have, a traditional call center, or maybe they’re answering the phone at each individual office. A lot of times they’re doing that, even if they have 10, 20, 30 locations, It’s at the practice level, it may roll over to a call center, it may just be a call center. So maybe compare Annie to a couple of those scenarios.

Adrian Lefler: So for BPO solutions, like business process outsourcing, where you’re hiring a sales floor somewhere to manage calls after hours, or on the weekends or calls roll over.

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Adrian Lefler: What I’m seeing the advantage of AI being is a level of quality control. I’ve called plenty of those call floors or been sent to plenty of those call floors myself. And Connor, the partner here, used to own one. So we have quite a bit of data and history with the partnership that allows us to understand some of the complications of a sales floor or call floor, if you want to call it that, is the problem is quality control. Okay. So a, a outsource call center, their job is to spend as little time as possible on the phone and get their information, the lead information and deliver it to the practice, depending on what the services that their, uh, the expectations of their services are. Okay. But I’ve been on plenty of calls where I’ve talked to an outsourced agent who has very little information on the practice. And their job is just to get my name, email and phone. And then they pass that along to the practice and allow the practice to follow up. So now I’m not saying that there aren’t good call floors out there that manage this stuff appropriately and well, because there are probably lots of them. But the question is, is how do you maintain quality control? Well, with an AI tool and the efficiencies and the fine tuning that you can do with it and the long-term training over and over and over, as you load in call after call after call, it’s training itself, right? It’s just simply getting, it’s already getting to the point where it’s better than a human being. So, and then in terms of quality control, that’s one aspect. And then the cost, right? I mean, I don’t know exactly what all these agencies are charging, these call floors are charging, but I’ve heard the numbers, and AI can do it at a fraction of the cost. So, so then you’ve got a cost, it becomes cost prohibitive, right, to use a live agent. So those are the, that’s what we’re betting on. We’re betting that, that the agents are the Annie, I should say, is literally, this is literally phase one of what she’s like, and I’ll, I mean, you heard her earlier when we played that clip, and I’ll make sure, actually, put up the QR code. If anybody wants to call and talk to Annie directly, just shoot this QR code, and I will create a phone number for you, and you can call her and just test it out. So this is Phase 1. OK, this is Phase 1 of Annie. She has gotten so good in like 6 months. Like if I showed her to you 6 months ago, you’d be like, this is, this is not something I’m willing to put in my practice. She’s just now to the point where we feel like she’s scalable. She’s, the quality is there. She can manage a lot of the, most of the phone calls extremely well. But the next version of Annie, which is going to be coming out here in the next 2 or 3 months, is, it’s going to become so good that it’s not going to make sense to spend more money on a live agent and risk them, that live agent, having a bad day or tired or just got off a call where they got yelled at and picked up another call, right? Or maybe they just got off a call and they worked through a scheduling appointment for the practice, and it was mind-numbingly difficult, right? Maybe their patient management system’s messed up, or who knows? Whatever kind of problems you run into with a call center, a lot of that stuff is gonna be removed as AI gets better and better. So, and this is not, this is not me saying, this is the entire industry of AI knows where this is going and knows how good it’s going to get. And that’s why people are dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the industry, because they know that it’s going to be extremely profitable for businesses who leverage it and lean into the technology.

Bill Neumann: Well, you really wrapped that up nicely there. I was going to do a wrap up, and I think you did that for me. So you saw the QR code there. We will also drop a URL in the show notes. just in case you want to click on that versus using the QR code. You had a chance to listen to Annie as well. It was really impressive, by the way. So I think it’s going to get a lot of people interested in reaching out to you. Adrian, if somebody just they’re interested in Annie or maybe they want to find out more about what my social practice does in general, you know, with social media, with websites, is there a way that they can reach out to you or somebody on your team? What’s the URL for My Social Practice so we can put that in the show notes?

Adrian Lefler: So our website is mysocialpractice.com. You’re welcome to go there. If you go there today, you won’t find any information. Well, today’s the third. It’ll be up there by next week, but you won’t find any information this week about Annie because we’re just launching the marketing campaign for her. So if you look at this next week, you should find information on the site about Annie in our services tab. You can also just shoot me an email. I’m happy to respond to anybody or answer any questions. My email is Adrian at mysocialpractice.com. That’s A-D-R-I-A-N at mysocialpractice.com. So you can shoot me an email, give us a call. If you just call the office and just say, Hey, I want to talk to somebody about Annie, we’ll get you the right person too. So. any of those ways would be great.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Great. Thank you, Adrian Leffler, my CEO of MySocialPractice. Great, great insights. I mean, just overall with what’s going on in the industry and with the changes in AI. I’m excited to see how Annie evolves in the coming months and years and how it helps really influence the industry and helps practices become more efficient. Certainly, that’s a good thing. And yeah, I mean, it’s just really, really pretty. And for anybody else out there, I mean, you’re probably going to end up seeing Adrian speak at a Upcoming show he’s got like it sounds like about a dozen of them in the next couple of months coming up speaking engagement So if you you get a chance to listen to him, you can just ask him in person.

Adrian Lefler: So yeah Grab me. I’ll probably buy you a beer.

Bill Neumann: There you go There’s a great idea that works. All right. Thanks. Thanks again Adrian and thanks everybody for watching this until next time This is the group dentistry now show

 

 

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