It feels like AI is everywhere these days — in every article, every tool, and soon, even the most basic promotional materials will be stamped “AI-enabled.”
Now imagine our team, building the most widely used ordering platform for private dental practices. You can guess how often we get asked: “Is your platform AI-powered? Do you use AI for this? AI for that?” Honestly, even we don’t always have a straightforward answer for how AI helps a dental practice in its day-to-day ordering. Internally, we use AI heavily for process optimization — after all, we’re a team of fewer than 10 people managing orders for hundreds of practices.
But that lingering question — how will AI really change dental ordering? — stuck with me. So I booked a trip to Silicon Valley for Kirill and me to see it firsthand, learning directly from companies that are truly “AI-first,” meaning their entire business is built on AI.
First of all, it’s mind-blowing how fast the industry has grown. Adoption is through the roof. I don’t know anyone under 35 who doesn’t have OpenAI’s app on their phone and doesn’t interact with it three to five times a day. In dentistry specifically, AI is already helping read X-rays, write clinical notes, verify insurance, process claims — basically, it's reshaping the front office.
This brings me to the back office — ordering supplies, scheduling service, submitting maintenance requests. Here, AI is just getting started. But it’s only a matter of time. AI thrives on messy, unstructured data — exactly what the back office is full of. If we can capture and organize all those small, seemingly unimportant data points, AI can eventually predict things like when a compressor is about to fail.
Here’s where I see AI use cases evolving for dental practices:
This field will evolve dramatically over the next five years. Many of the routine tasks we handle today — especially in the back office — will look very different.
And at ZenOne, we can’t wait to be part of that evolution.