For multi-office practices and OSOs navigating growth and staffing pressures, agentic AI offers a new approach to automation that supports smoother operations and a more patient-centered use of staff time.
By Nathan James
The orthodontics industry has never lacked assistants. It’s full of them. Scheduling assistants. Insurance assistants. Even AI assistants that promise to lighten the load. But the real transformation won’t come from more helpers. It will come from agents: AI systems that think, decide, and act alongside your team instead of waiting for instructions. If your AI still needs you to click “confirm,” on routine operational tasks, it’s not intelligent. Real intelligence removes busywork and allows humans to focus on judgment, strategy, and patient care.
For multi-office practices and orthodontic support organizations (OSOs), where growth depends on efficiency at scale, this marks a turning point. Agentic AI is poised to reshape how practices operate, unlocking new productivity and profitability gains.
From Assistance to Action
Think of your practice as a relay race. Today’s AI passes the baton, helping staff move faster, but always stopping short of the finish line. Helpful? Yes. But still much too dependent on humans to interpret and act.
Agentic AI runs the last stretch itself, closing loops, booking patients, and following up on claims automatically. It assists your team and extends it.
Instead of surfacing a list of patients overdue for an aligner check, an AI agent can reach out, book the appointment, and update the schedule across multiple offices in real time. Instead of alerting staff that a claim requires documentation, an agent can assemble and submit it, then track the status until payment posts. In short, assistants inform. Agents perform.
The Agentic Workforce Model
The orthodontic workforce of the future isn’t just computers and robots. It’s not purely human or purely digital; it’s hybrid. Human teams will focus on care, growth, and patient experience, while agentic systems handle the repetitive workflows that slow them down.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Scheduling agents fill open slots, reduce no-shows, and optimize chair utilization across locations.
- Revenue agents automate insurance claims, pre-authorizations, and payment follow-ups, cutting days off A/R cycles.
- Communication agents manage inbound and outbound messages, from appointment reminders to missed-payment outreach.
- Quality assurance agents continuously audit data accuracy, preventing small errors from compounding across offices.
These agents amplify staff. By offloading administrative friction, multi-location and OSO teams can focus on what technology can’t replicate: the empathy, expertise, and personal trust at the heart of orthodontic care.
For example, imagine a digital agent that monitors outstanding insurance claims overnight, resubmits missing documentation automatically, and updates ledgers before the office opens. When the front desk arrives, they’re not chasing denials, but greeting patients. That’s the power of an agentic teammate: invisible, tireless, and always working to free humans for human work.
Why Multi-Location Practices and OSOs Are Uniquely Positioned
Few healthcare sectors are as ready for this shift as orthodontics. Multi-location practices and OSOs already sit on vast, structured datasets: treatment plans, scheduling histories, imaging, claims data, and patient communications. The challenge lies in activating this data.
Historically, those data streams lived in silos. Each system handled one piece of the puzzle: imaging, scheduling, billing. AI thrives on connection, and the offices that have modernized to cloud-based, API-first infrastructure now have the foundation to bring those silos together.
When connected systems can “talk” to each other, agents can coordinate actions across them, rescheduling a patient in one platform while updating billing in another, or reconciling a claim across multiple payers. The result is an intelligent operating layer that sits above existing tools, orchestrating work across the enterprise rather than adding another tool to manage.
The Economic Case
At its core, AI is an EBITDA story. For multi-location practices, even small efficiency gains scale quickly.
- Automating claim follow-up and payment posting can recapture thousands of dollars per month per location.
- AI-powered scheduling can reduce no-shows by up to 40%, protecting chair time and revenue.
- Agentic workflows can perform repetitive administrative work at a fraction of the cost of human FTEs, easing staffing shortages that have persisted since the pandemic.
This form of labor arbitrage, where technology absorbs routine work, strengthens both margins and morale. Teams aren’t being replaced; they’re being refocused on higher-value patient interactions.
Of course, the shift to agentic AI isn’t plug-and-play. The biggest barriers for practices today are legacy systems, fragmented workflows, and workforce skepticism. Many still operate on outdated, on-premise practice management software that can’t support the data exchange AI requires.
The good news is that these hurdles are solvable. Modernizing infrastructure to cloud-based platforms, setting clear data governance policies, and investing in staff training all create the foundation for safe, scalable AI adoption. The organizations that begin building this foundation now will be the first to deploy agents that act with speed, precision, and compliance.
A Leadership Imperative
AI will not replace orthodontic professionals, but multi-location practices and OSOs that embrace agentic systems will outperform those that don’t. The transition from assistants to agents represents more than an efficiency upgrade; it’s a redefinition of how orthodontic organizations operate.
Leaders should ask themselves three questions:
- Are our systems ready for AI agents to connect and act across them?
- Do we have an AI roadmap that aligns with our growth and EBITDA goals?
- Are we preparing our teams to collaborate confidently with digital teammates?
Those who can answer “yes” will be the first to capture the benefits of this new operating model. Success in orthodontics will come from empowering agents that let people do their best work. OP
Photo: ID 397692845 © Wanan Yossingkum | Dreamstime.com
Nathan James is the chief product officer at Planet DDS.
