Dentists Are Not Going Anywhere, But The Way They Work is Changing Fast || ft. Sompop Bencharit

What we covered

• Dr. Sompop Bencharit's path from a mother-redirected school choice in Thailand to twenty years at UNC Chapel Hill, then building digital centers at VCU, MUSC, and High Point University.
• Why he now runs an AI-in-dental-education network spanning more than seventy institutions worldwide.
• His answer to dentists who insist "dentistry is the people's business" and want no part of AI.
• The direct comparison he draws between today's AI resistance and dentists who once refused to give up developing their own x-ray film.
• His teaching philosophy — that dental schools should train people how to learn, not just what to do — and where it came from.
• How AI-assisted risk modeling changes what he can actually tell a patient in the chair, compared to reciting a generic clinical-trial statistic.

Moments worth your time

Early on, Bencharit explains why he ended up in dentistry at all — not medicine, which is what he originally wanted. His mother steered him there directly: "these medical schools are so far. I don't want you to go. Why don't you look into dentistry?"

When asked how dentists overcome their fear of AI, he doesn't reach for a hype pitch. He reaches for the darkroom: "Are you still developing your film? ...I mean, who does that anymore?"

He describes the moment that shaped his entire approach to teaching, on his first day as a resident: his program director told the incoming class, "somehow we're not here to teach you anything" — and explains why that line changed how he thinks about dental education for good.

Near the end, he draws the line he won't cross on AI adoption: "too much of medicine could kill a patient, too little medicine might not help the patient... you have to have a balance."

In their words

"We work in the patient mouth. So we are probably closer to you than most profession, and you work inside your mouth while you are conscious."

"Don't think about AI thing. Think about it as a technology."

"If they have an iPhone... they already use AI. So get on with the train or we will leave you behind."

Who should watch this

You're a dentist, dental educator, or practice leader who's heard the "AI has no place in dentistry" argument from a colleague — or made it yourself — and want a working practitioner's answer, not a vendor's pitch. If you're weighing how to bring a resistant team along without a hard reset, this conversation gives you the exact analogy Bencharit uses to do it.

Put it to work

Set a timer for ten minutes. Write down every piece of technology in your practice today that you or your team accepted without a fight — digital x-rays, intraoral scanners, online scheduling, text reminders. Next to each one, write the year it arrived and how resistant people were to it at the time. Then look at whatever AI tool you're currently avoiding and ask which item on that list it most resembles. Bencharit's point is that the resistance pattern repeats — naming it for your own practice is the first step to moving past it.

If that exercise surfaces a real gap in how your team is being trained on AI or new technology, see how we train practices — built around the same idea Bencharit teaches his residents: train people to learn, not just to follow one procedure.