Practice Stories
Prosthodontist · dental educator · AI-in-dental-education network
A prosthodontist who has taught at four dental schools explains why the dentists most afraid of AI are the same ones who once refused to give up the darkroom.
Sompop Bencharit wanted to be a doctor. In Thailand, where the school system tracks students into a profession years before graduation, he had already built a ranked list of medical schools he hoped to attend. His mother looked at it and redirected him. "You know, these medical schools are so far. I don't want you to go. Why don't you look into dentistry? You know, this is close to the home." He didn't argue much. "I tried. I got in."
The compromise became a calling. The longer he studied, the more he recognized that dentistry sat exactly where he wanted to be: "we come we have some medicine and then dentistry, and the dentistry is something between the medical staff or also in artistry." What sealed it was proximity — literal, physical proximity to another human being. "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. So it's a very personable especially in health and health care component, and it also has some sort of artistic skill application."
He graduated dental school in Thailand in 1994 and landed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the next twenty years — resident in graduate prosthodontics, then a PhD in oral biology, then a decade teaching. From there he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University to build its digital center from scratch. It worked. "So now VCU have probably one of the most advanced digital center in the world." Next came the Medical University of South Carolina as assistant dean for innovation, then a new dental school at High Point University, helping design its digital integration from the ground up.
Along the way he became a Formlabs beta tester for chairside 3D printing, back when almost no practice owned a printer and every case shipped to an outside lab. "Oh my god, this is so easy. You could print everything in house with a high precision and the cost less for dentists." Today, he says, walk into any dental office in a city like Brooklyn and there's a decent chance half of them own one.
Now Bencharit runs an AI-in-dental-education network of more than seventy institutions worldwide, and he spends a fair amount of his time talking dentists off a ledge. Many of them, he's found, hold the same objection: "dentistry is the people's business. AI has no place in the dentistry." He's watched this exact movie before. "I would ask the same dentist like, 'Are you still developing your film?' Because not long ago, when I was doing dental school, we have to develop our film ourselves, take x-ray, then just dip into bucket, in the dark room. I mean, who does that anymore?" Digital radiography felt like a threat in the year 2000. A decade later nobody remembered being afraid of it.
His fix isn't a pep talk about the future — it's a reframe of the present. "Don't think about AI thing. Think about it as a technology." He points out, almost impatiently, that most resistant dentists are already using AI constantly and just haven't noticed: intraoral scanners have carried it for years, radiology software already flags caries and bone loss, and anyone with a smartphone or a social feed is interacting with it daily. "If they have an iPhone... they already use AI. So get on with the train or we will leave you behind."
The philosophy behind all of it traces back to his first day as a resident at UNC, when the program director told his incoming class something that stunned him. "You know, somehow we're not here to teach you anything." It reordered how he thought about education entirely. "We need to train learner to learn. If you know how to learn, right, you can learn anything." He's carried that principle into every school he's built since, insisting dental students get multiple ways to learn rather than one prescribed method. "Once you find that, then you can redo it in different environments, different problems, different technologies... this is the fundamental innovation."
That same philosophy is what makes his answer on AI feel less like advocacy and more like inevitability. If a student learns how to learn, a new technology stops being a threat and starts being "a playground." He's watched it prove out in his own patient chair, where AI-assisted risk modeling lets him tell a real patient, not a clinical-trial average, what her actual odds look like. "Without AI, I can't do that. I can just guess."
For all his certainty about the direction dentistry is headed, Bencharit keeps returning to a caveat he won't let go of. "Too much of medicine could kill a patient, too little medicine might not help the patient, but you need to have a balance. And AI is the same as everything else. You have to have a balance. You have a sweet spot." He wants dentists to understand not just how to use these tools but how they work, so the profession isn't left training on a black box.
It's an open commitment more than a finished answer: how do you teach thirty more years of dentists to hold that balance when the tools won't stop changing? He doesn't claim to have it solved. He just keeps showing up at the ACP symposium, the ADA workforce panels on Oral Health 2050, and his own LinkedIn feed — where he posts on a rotating theme, "3D printing Monday... prosthetic wake-up call... AI Sunday" — one dentist, one dental school, at a time.
Watch the conversation to hear him work through the film-developing analogy, the mother who steered him toward dentistry, and what he tells a dental student who's just starting out.