AI Is There To Help, Not To Replace | Steve Craig

What we covered

• Steve Craig's thirty-year sales path — office equipment, ophthalmology, Johnson & Johnson's DSO build-out, and now VP of Sales at Solmetex.
• Why water is dentistry's "dirty secret": roughly seventy percent of US practices don't test, shock, or treat their water lines.
• What Solmetex's family of companies actually does — amalgam and vacuum capture, water treatment, and isolation systems for four-handed dentistry.
• The COVID-era discovery that seventy-eight percent of dental aerosols come from water lines, not patients.
• His read on where AI is actually landing in dental practices today, and the fragmentation problem he sees as the industry's biggest open opportunity.
• Why he tells young dentists and sales hires to choose mentorship over the higher-paying job.

Moments worth your time

Early in the conversation, Craig explains the actual scale of the water problem most practices never think about, using an image that's hard to shake: a swimming pool used for hours, several days a week, never cleaned in between — except dental water lines run invisibly through the walls, so nobody notices.

Asked directly where AI fits into dentistry, he doesn't equivocate: "I don't think AI is going to take people's jobs... I think it's people that know how to use AI that are going to be the people that end up at top."

He then names the gap he thinks nobody has closed yet: "the average dental practice, especially in the DSO space, will probably have fifteen different AI tools and none of them talk to each other." His prediction follows immediately: whoever solves that will be dentistry's next billionaire.

Near the end, he offers the rule he says built his own career, in response to the excuse that there's no time to learn something new: "if you spend eighteen minutes a day... you'll know more than ninety percent of the US in that thing."

In their words

"Water is the number one instrument used in dentistry. You can't do any procedures without water."

"I don't believe humans fear change, they fear sudden change."

"Choose your hard. It's either hard now and easy later, or it's easy now and it's hard later."

Who should watch this

You're a practice owner or DSO leader who has already bought several AI tools — a scheduling assistant here, a diagnostic tool there, maybe a phone agent — and you're starting to suspect none of them are actually working together. If you want a thirty-year sales veteran's honest read on where that fragmentation is headed and what it's costing you, this episode names the problem plainly.

Put it to work

List every software or AI tool your practice currently pays for — scheduling, phone/voice, diagnostics, billing, patient communication, marketing. Next to each one, write down whether it can see or act on data from any of the others. Circle the pairs that should talk to each other but don't — the referral tool that doesn't know what the phone agent already told a patient, the billing system that doesn't flag what the diagnostic tool caught. That circled list is your fragmentation map, and it's exactly the gap Craig says nobody in dentistry has closed yet.

If your list has more than two or three circles on it, that's the disconnected-tools problem Craig says will define who wins next in dental AI — book a Practice Growth Map to get it mapped and prioritized.