Transcription
There are thousands of insurance companies. Every single one has a different process, different workflow. Standardizing all of this unstructured data is a massive problem.
What we've deployed is a bunch of AI agents that will call the insurance company and go figure out what exactly happened. Not only do we pass the touring test, the human agent was like, "You're really good at your job. You're so efficient." The AI was like, "Yeah, thank you so much. Like, really appreciate it." So, you want to take human workers, take away the waiting on the phone, the boring stuff, let them operate at a higher level to actually create more value. People always ask us, does this mean I have to lay off my team? Actually, what we find CEO and [Music] Dental billing. Why are we talking about dental billing? It's actually tied to some of the most important stuff going on in our economy today. Shreas and Anton are building Daydream, which is the quintessential AI services company. There's this huge wave of these companies in our economy that will empower small business owners. They're going to help other workers work on more interesting problems instead of having to do the grunt work. It's going to make these small businesses more profitable and it's going to raise productivity in our economy. You know, a lot of people are afraid of what we're seeing with AI right now. Talking to Shreas and Anton, you can't help but be optimistic for the impact here on dentists in this case. Over 140,000 dentists, on small businesses, and on the jobs people get to do in the future economy. This is great for our kids. It's great for our country. Excited for you to meet Shreas and Anton. Welcome to American Optimist.
Today we have Shreas and Anton from Daydream. Daydream is a dental billing company, which is like why are we talking to a dental billing company? But obviously there's a huge wave happening in AI and productivity and you guys are doing awesome work. So thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. We're stoked. Yeah, excited to be here. I think a lot of people say, "Oh yeah, you guys are like building autonomous warships and like curing diseases. Like why are you doing this?" But you know, in my mind this is some of the most important stuff in our economy because like basically there's a lot of smart people that spend you know millions of hours on these sorts of things and it's a total mess and it makes everything more expensive and you guys I guess how dentists are there overall in the country? There are over 140,000 dentists in America. 140,000 dentists. And so this is a key workflow for all of them. Um and like why is this important for you guys to solve? What's your what's your background here? How did you come to this?
Yeah. Yeah. I jokingly say I was born into dental school. My mom was pregnant with me when she got into dental school. Uh she raised me all throughout it. When I was 10 years old, she started her own practice. She really built her own American dream. And I was there. I was the IT guy, the bookkeeper, the janitor. Um dental I did not choose the dental life. It definitely chose me. Uh and since then, I have not been able to escape it. But and Anton, you grew up in Fremont, which I did as well. Is is there is there dentistry in your background or you just interested in the idea? No dentistry, my background, but interested in great businesses and also just like uh like helping automate this like really boring process. I love it. And so maybe explain to us a little bit really boring process like like what what is dental billing? There's something called healthcare billing in general. This is a type of healthcare billing. How does it work and why does it matter?
Yeah. I mean, think about any experience any American has had at a dentist. There's always someone who's gotten a bill that they don't understand. an insurance denial that doesn't make sense, suddenly a bill that is higher than they expect. And it's because in dentistry and in healthcare in America, not only do you have to pay the dentist, the insurance company has to pay the dentist. So there's this really long complicated process called revenue cycle management where basically when a dentist does work on a patient, they have to submit a bunch of paperwork to the insurance company. If that paperwork so much has a missing comma, the insurance company can deny that claim, which means then the dentist might not get paid or the patient has to pay. And so there's all of these rules and regulations and this complicated process the dentist has to follow. And if they don't, someone else has to pay. I mean, how many rules can there possibly be? Hundreds of thousands because there are thousands of insurance companies and every single one has a different process, different workflow. And again, standardizing all of this unstructured data is a massive problem. And I think it's also like hundreds of thousands of rules, but also no rules, right? Nothing written down. It's something you just have to learn as it happens. Crazy. If there's like a specialized like like profession of just learning over time which things are going to work, which things are not going to work. So if someone is a dentist, they're starting off, they have to like hire people who know what they're doing here.
Yeah. If in fact, you know, when you look at what it takes to become a dental biller, there's no class, there's no college for medical billing. It's a whole industry. You can go to a community college and take a medical billing class. In dental billing, there's no experts. All of them just learn from previous generations of dental billers. So, most people in the industry, you ask them, "How did you learn how to do this?" They said, "Well, the office manager before me taught that, and then I just spent 20 years doing it." Did someone write like a good book at least or something? Actually, someone on our billing team actually wrote a book on how to do it. And so, it's we're we actually put out content on how to do this because there's a huge lack of knowledge in this industry. So, take us through what you guys are doing. Like obviously AI is going to change this and make it a lot easier. AI still makes mistakes too though. It's not perfect. So so so what's possible here? What are you guys building?
Yeah, I think um at its core we're like a tech- enabled service. So what we actually have is a team of roughly 30 billers. Um and we're really prioritizing human in the loop. Um and so our AI does a lot of the you know like boring manual processes. Um and does like to the extent that it can but obviously sometimes there's like some higher order decision-m needing to happen. And to do that, we rely really on our team of like expert in-house billers. Like each one of these um billers are US-based. They have eight years of experience in a dental office doing dental billing. And they really help us like train not just like our own AI systems on how to do this process, but also like the engineers work with them very very closely and like really really understand the different workflows that are required to do this entire process. So I love this framework of what you know there was a essay in 1961 by Licklitter a famous kind of computer science philosopher which he wrote about man machine symbiosis which we always talked about at Palanteer like what does the machine do best and what do the people do best back then you said man because that meant everyone but it's you know I guess nowadays you'd maybe say people machine symbiosis but fortunately we're not politically correct around here so it's okay so in general obviously there's more things the machine can do than it could before but what you're saying is it still can't do everything. Is it getting to a point where maybe you can do like almost everything or is there still like you have a ton of these billers in 10 years will it be doing everything? How do you think about it?
I think in a couple years. Um what I would say is that dental billing like the difficult part is it's very unintuitive. So it's it's also not like written down. It's not really in like the training data, right? Um and that like unintuitiveness is why we need the billers to like sort of correct the system. Also like for the billers to teach the engineers like why is this the way that it is? Um, and I can maybe give an example of like one edge case. What's the edge case? So, it's like let's say um you got an EOB back from the insurance company and EOB is basically a receipt on how they adjudicated and or paid the claim, right? This usually comes in the mail um along with a check. And it could be that like you got this EOB back for this claim and you're like, I never even submitted this claim and it turns out that they sent it back um under the parents name instead of the child's name because they're on the same insurance plan, right? And so like you'd have to go into the EHR and go figure out like, oh, actually, I never submitted this claim. Let me check the family file. let me like go look at this. And then it turns out you submitted four X-ray codes and they returned back, oh, we paid you for one code. And you're like, why is this the case? And it turns out, oh, they combine the different codes together um in this like very unintuitive way in a way that like they would have to pay less. And so like all these just weird edge cases is something that it's extremely hard to co encode into like business logic.
Interesting. So there's something where you try to say you owe me for this and this and they say actually this thing over here is only one code, but that should cover both of these and therefore I'm going to pay you less. Exactly. Exactly. And so there's just all sorts of these nuances and it turns out there's a combinations are massive. Yeah. Yeah. And like nothing's written down and it's extremely unintuitive and so like business logic before wasn't able to really like handle these edge cases but LLM's and sort of reason as to why something may have happened and like take more context. I think what you guys are doing what's what's interesting to me as well is I think this is like a example of a lot of other businesses that are going to exist in our economy. Right. So there's there's this massive wave. There's I think there's $5 trillion dollars of wages or something in US services economy. This is an example of going after and making that more efficient which obviously creates wealth for everyone except for I guess some of the billers you're replacing right but but o overall it's a good thing for the dentist overall it's a good thing for the for the consumers right well I will say on the billing side one thing that I always tell our billing team is so much of their work historically has been working in the business doing data entry being on hold with the insurance company these people are experts in their craft they have eight plus years of experience they should be working on the business so many of these single location private practice dentists they're small business owners ers who are looking for someone to come in with expertise to help them build and grow the business.
Interesting. And one thing that we I always tell the billing team is, you know, you are going from just doing dental billing work to becoming dental consultants, really helping them grow the business, identifying new revenue opportunities, new ways to grow the business. And that's what humans are really good at. This is a really great point. So, you want to take human workers, uh, take away the kind of grunt work, take away the waiting on the phone, the boring stuff, let them operate at a higher level to actually create more value. And so what you're doing is you're going to have more value created per person by far. Exactly. Exactly. And one thing that's kind of counterintuitive that we've seen when we work with groups and you know large practices, you know, people always ask us, "Does this mean I have to lay off my team?" And we always say, "No, actually what we find is they reallocate the resources of their existing team to again higher level work, which then grows their business, which then merits even more people to actually sustain a growing practice. you end up having to hire another dentist or another person to help with the office or as it grows. That's very interesting. And so so so what has been the response so far? Like what kind of efficiency gains are you making? Like how's it working?
Yeah. Do you want to talk about the Yeah. Uh like one really big thing is that we help recover like outstanding claim revenues like outstanding like AR. So So AR this is like money that like they try to charge they never got it and maybe it was from a year ago or two years ago. Yeah. Basically, one in five claims that you send to a dental insurance company just like won't come back within 30 days. And you're going to have to call or go to the insurance portal and figure out what happened to the 20% of the claims you have to go chase. Yes. Exactly. And so what we've deployed is a bunch of AI agents that will call the insurance company and go figure out what exactly happened to your check, right? Maybe it got lost in the mail and they'll the agent will ask to reissue the check. This is crazy though. Like you should just be an API at the company, but they don't have an API which there's no way for the computer to talk to it. So you have to pretend to be a human to talk to it. It's the only way to do it. Exactly. And like you know maybe on the insurance company side like they will also have AI talking presumably in the future and they'll just like AI to AI. AI will start talking. I heard like maybe they'll start developing like a secret language at some point. It's much faster. Maybe more. I don't know. English is not necessarily like for us it's it works you know Chinese or English or something but like but they probably have some other language. Yeah. It is funny cuz right now we have the AI voices talking our AI agents talking to like the humans on their side. Yeah. And not only do we pass the touring test, we had a call two weeks ago where the the human agent was like, "Wow, your voice sounds really familiar. I didn't I talked to you yesterday. You're really good at your job. You're so efficient." And the AI was like, "Yeah, thank you so much. Like really appreciate it. I'm doing this a lot." And uh again, like it's we see these conversations happen all the time. Um in fact, word on the street is the insurance rep prefer the AI phone calls because of how efficient they are. That's true. The AI phone calls get right down to business. You know, you know, you know they're going to be that's It actually is funny. Customer support that works through AI, people are happier in general, right? On both sides. It's like just not as annoying.
What What What kind of efficiency gains are you seeing? Like how do you guys think about this from like a productivity perspective? I mean, one of my KPIs is always how many dollars are we putting back in the dentist pocket? So, there was this wonderful husband wife team in Colorado. They had $800,000 in outstanding claims. This is like what almost a million dollars a lot. It is a lot of money over over multiple years and over multiple years. And again, they're not alone. I mean, we we work with practices where this is like not uncommon to have half a million dollars. Wow. And if you can imagine being a small business owner or even a large business, a lot of money for everyone. It's a lot of money for me. Exactly. So, it's a lot of money. And you know, in 6 months, we were able to recover $400,000. So, $400,000 that was held up in these insurance companies. And again, if it was just humans doing it, it would take years to do this kind of cleanup. Is this because you're doing so many calls as well? Is like like what kind of stuff you doing? So it's suddenly like for every outstanding claim that the human has to work, instead of them spending 30 minutes on the phone, the AI agent is doing it. Instead of them having to go navigate these old insurance portals and spend a bunch of time just looking up data, it's brought back. The AI agent brings that data back for the human to then decide, hey, what is the next step? And you kind of start to see this weird paradigm where our billers are orchestrating these agents as almost like a puppet master, right? Like, hey, intern, go do this. go on hold for me. I will wait for you to come back with the information. I'll make a decision. And what we find is that they're able to work through three to five times more claims in the same amount of time because they're no longer doing this menial work. There's something weird where our society works based on trust right now that you can call people. What if people just started spamming everyone? I guess it would be expensive to do that or something. Like it's kind of interesting you just call people and get things done. There's no there's no like code to get in or something.
Yeah. You know what's funny? Sometimes the insurance reps, they'll ask the AI, like if they suspect it's AI, hey, how's the weather where you are? They'll like try to ask like codes to sus it out. Um, and now the AI has gotten good enough to get around it, which is pretty cool. How's the weather where you are? Are you getting ready for the answer, huh? Yeah. Oh, man. But do people get angry sometimes that it's AI? Not angry, but sometimes they will hang up the phone. Um, but like that happens like less than 8% of the time. Yeah. Exactly. You measure it, of course. And so it's working. You're getting the old money back. you're making their business more efficient in terms of operating. It's gonna cost less. Like where do you go beyond billing? Are you thinking about other use cases for this?
Yeah, I mean, I think we're all in on dental. Again, maybe it's just because of of uh where I grew up, but there's so many problems that a a dental practice has that most people are not seeing. If you think about these people, you know, people like my mom, they're fantastic clinicians. They went to a ridiculous amount of schooling to become amazing dentists. No one ever taught them how to do insurance billing. No one ever taught them how to read Quickbooks. No one ever taught them how to do expense management. The world that I see daydream moving into very quickly is right now we help dentists bring money into their business. Well, what happens afterwards? Where do they store that money? How do they help grow that money? Where do they spend it? How do they spend it? I could very much see a world where we are back office in a box for dentists. Interesting. where suddenly dentists can just focus on the thing they love which is patients. And then we handle a lot of the back office functions like making sure that everyone's getting paid, making sure that the patients are getting the right bills sent to them, making sure that hey your revenue is growing and you're able to grow your business, not just survive. Making sure you get the accounting hooked up and the legal and everything hooked up. Huh. Really the financial operating system of the business um is what is what the vision is. That's awesome. So there's 140,000 dentists, right? You start you're just just getting going. How are you how are you reaching out to more dentists by the way? I'm curious like how how do you go people you're saving them a lot of money. How do you tell them about it?
Yeah, I mean we we've been doing a lot of creative stuff. Again, this is an industry that traditional people have not innovated on go to market on. And actually, if it's okay, I'll show you an example of one of these. So, this is a campaign we're doing. Um I don't know if you can see this. Uh your cash is here. I'll put it in front of me. Look at this. What's it say? There you go. Your cash is locked inside, ready to set it free. And inside is a a little uh little surprise here. It's actually a safe and in order to unlock this safe. That's cool. You have to schedule a demo with us. We'll send you a three-digit code and inside is a prize because you know for so many practices their money is quite literally locked in by you send them like money in here sometimes. Yeah. In fact, and in these boxes could be anywhere from $100 to $5,000. So the regular $100, $100 bills. And word on the street is I know we were talking about this before the pod. Maybe a special surprise from you. That's right. That's right. Well, I was saying if you're going to have $100 bills, maybe we should have like some fun $500 bills as well. I I used to collect these larger bills which that I don't know if dentists are into that. Maybe they would be though. I think it'd be cool. It's like one insurance claim. Well, it's actually particularly relevant today actually given uh all the discussion around tariffs is I think McKinley would actually be the president on the $500 bill. So we have we have a lot I just interviewed Mark and Drees on on this a few weeks ago and and like you know a lot of what Trump's doing was very similar to what McKinley would talk about with tariffs. So anyway it'd be interesting to get one of his bills too. That would be cool. That would be cool. Yeah, I I love it. So that's that's a neat idea. So you're sending everyone safes with cash. I guess if they don't schedule a demo, the cash is just locked in and which is kind of which is kind of similar to what's happening with their cash as it is. Exactly. If they don't use someone like Daydream, their money is quite literally in someone else's pocket. Um and again I think what we've really noticed is you know in traditional SMB marketing and go to market you know it used to be field sales now one of our biggest sources is actually u that could be the the uh YouTube uh thumbnail you know that's a like um but it's you know Facebook groups we are in so deeply embedded in these communities I probably spend 10 hours a week on weekends Saturdays and Sundays just answering dentist questions in these groups adding value to their you know to their community.
You know, it's funny. If you go back two generations in our country, a lot of the dentists were like immigrant Jews. And so, a lot of my my mom's side's Jewish and a lot of like my great uncles and stuff were dentists and they were great dentists and it's kind of like seems like paralleled now with a lot of the Indian communities. Is that the case? Yeah. Yeah. There's uh a lot of South Asian dentists and a lot of immigrant dentists. I mean, you know, I know, you know, we talk a lot about like American optimist. You guys talk a lot about on the show like again so many dentists are really chasing their American dream. they came here from a different country and build their own business. I mean, it is like it is very exciting and you you live very well at the dentist. These people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? And they're doing very well. Well, they are producing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Are they collecting all of it is what we help them do. But uh so so I want to ask about this because this is there's these independent practices in dentistry. Uh there's another trend which is private equities rolling up dental. Maybe in part because it is hard for some people to run their own offices. Like what do you think about this trend? Is it is that trend not as necessary with what you guys are doing maybe?
Yeah, I mean, we've seen it almost double the amount of dental practices in the past six years that are owned by private equity. It's doubled in the past six years and this trend is because of like people are saying I'm tired of running the business side. I just kind of want to off you know get this off of my hands. Um we see this trend happening. We serve both single location small practices in Omaha, Nebraska all the way to large groups that are private equity backed in Texas. I mean, we serve the whole gamut. Um, our take is dentists should have that choice on how they want to run their business. You'll you'll help either one. If they want to be independent, you can help them do that better and with more what you build. But if you want to make a private equity group work better, you guys are good at that, too. And for a lot of these uh private equity backed ones, what we're noticing is like we basically become their drop in RCM department. These private equity firms are great at acquiring practices, doing real estate deals. They're not really good at dental insurance. No one is really good at dental insurance. And so what we see them coming to us as is like, hey, I have a lot of money on the table. Can you help us recover it? And the ROI for them is quite clear. And then for the SMB side, what we see is, hey, I literally cannot find people in Omaha, Nebraska to do this, you know. Um, so we we serve both. But it is both exciting and also somewhat interesting to see the impact on healthcare in America. And I would say dental to me is the last frontier. You know, in medical there's been so much consolidation over the past 20 years. in dental, 70% of the market are still people like my mom who just love being in the community, serving the community. You know, there's not a diner in our town that they don't know Dr. Sue, you know, and I think that's special. I love it. And so there's this long tale of healthcare in America, especially dentistry, like like what's what's the optimistic case? How does healthcare look different if this stuff works?
I think the world that I'm really excited about is when we have these like groups that start to form. So not these like thousand location practices, but groups where they basically really know deeply the region. and they deeply know the community and the needs of that community and are able to run more efficiently and actually focus on patient care and what the patient needs. So much of the bad rep that dentists get in this country of oh, they suddenly prescribe me more fillings than I think I need, it's because dentists are feeling the squeeze of the supplies going up, the insurance company's getting more complicated. In the world where Daydream is in every one of these 140,000 practices, the dentist can just focus on patient care and they don't have to worry about the back office BS. So, no, it makes them do it right. That is unfortunate. Some of them have bad incentives. Some of them are really good good I guess in that. Let's dig a little more into the AI as well here because I think I think this is if we're stepping back again, there's going to be a lot of businesses in our economy that are making things more productive. They're helping people operate, you know, on the more interesting problems because the AI is taking care of the more routine things. Like what how does that work?
LMS obviously we all see them I think very famously you know went crazy on X recently and said some said some fairly intense things like there's like these things are these things are obviously still flawed they're still figuring everything out they're still making mistakes like how are you harnessing this to to do to do a good job and not just be crazy yeah yeah I mean I think like the way that we think about it is like there's probably two modalities of like how we use LLMs one is like data rails data normalization and like traditionally I would say like one of the differences between dental and medical is that like the data rails and medical are far far better. Um, and so like this might be, you know, calling the insurance company to get the status of a claim check where traditionally it might be like an API call, right? Um, or using like AI agents to scrape the web portals um, and to gather information about like a claim or like uh like benefits for a patient, right? What what is covered, what is not. So the AI can go looking and get all the information from the web portals as well as have all the data that you guys have. Exactly. And so that's like data normalization and like augmenting what are like broken data rails with LLMs, right? And that wasn't possible before because it's so unstructured, right? Um, and then I would say like the the second part is like probably like the more agentic LM stuff which is like okay now that I have all this data, how do I act on it? What decisions do I do? Right? Like how do I post this into like how do I post the payment into like you know the EHR in the correct way given like A, B, and C uh conditions that are like all three individual S cases like mixed together.
So you're mapping out a palent we call it an ontology. You're mapping out an ontology of the data which you're structuring and then you're mapping out the ontology of the workflow basically and defining the types of workflows you could do and then seeing which ones the agents can do and and then you're you're training them how to do it. You're practicing. Yeah. Exactly. Um and so like the way we do it is that every engineer uh at our company owns a workflow and they're measured on the automation lift on that workflow. Right. Um and so they work extremely closely with the humans and the builders sort of understand and then sort of you know some may call it prompt uh some may call it like engineering like like business logic. Um they they sort of just figure out how do we mimic these human workflows uh in a way that is like repeatable and obviously like has to be extremely high quality because you are basically doing accounting for the dentist. And so they're iterating a bunch on things including the prompts to get it to like work a very high percent of the time. Exactly. And and are there like how high percent of time does it have to work for that workflow for it to like be usable by the billers? Like how do you think about that?
It's very dependent on the workflow. I would say uh sometimes we go with the you know like Devon approach of like the agent doing everything and sometimes we go with the cursor approach of let's augment the human a little bit and like maybe try to 10x the human. Um but I would say like you have to be very intellectually rigorous with how you choose to automate. I'll give one example is like if the A agent calls the insurance company and you need 10 pieces of information and the agent is able to get nine pieces of information, the human still has to call the insurance company, wait on hold and get that last piece of information. So you actually ended up automating less than 90% of the work, right? Almost closer to 20%. Something like that because the human still has to do repeat work if you're not able to do all of it, right? So just being very like rigorous about how we measure the automation and like how we go about automating certain parts um I think is like sort of like the key sauce in what we do.
Are there certain things you learn like okay that it should say at the beginning of the call I have 10 pieces of information I need in order to get this call done right and can you help me with them or are things like that you kind of practice with or how's how's that work? Yeah, I think like we obviously play around with the script, we play around with the voices. Um, but I would say like part of it is the calling, but also part of it is a lot lot of just like like like it's like web scraping stuff and like how sure are you that the information you got is correct? Because if you're unsure, the human doesn't really want to trust the system and the human will go back and like redo the work. Are there certain voices that work better than others? Like is it like a Sean Connory or is it like a friendly woman or like like what do people want to hear? We AB test a whole bunch of different voices, a whole bunch of different accents. Get very strong Indian accent. They think they're outsourced Indian person calling. We we have used some offshore accents and I would say that like one funny tidbit is the name that we use for our AA agent is Alex Lee and the reason is it's the shortest one. It's like ethnically ambiguous. It's gender ambiguous and it's very very easy for the A to spell it out correctly. Yeah, that's funny. And and I think like one of the you know going back to the reasoning and the agent, how do we get it better? having that billing agency of human data labelers in house. This is a part of the story we maybe didn't mention which was you know we basically went out and acquired an existing service business a billing agency that ran and then we used AI to automate it from the inside and one of the unique things about that was effectively we have data labelers inhouse so as we are experimenting with these prompts and these agentic workflows the agents are not having to like net new understand they're watching all of the data that we are collecting as our human team is doing the work this is a very interesting ing strategy.
So you actually bought a services business and then use that to kind of like get going and training and working on which is probably a very common thing a lot of our people are going to do. You get one services business, you make it much better and you can expand it massively. Huh. Exactly. Exactly. And I I would say that probably saved us like years of time having to come up with a zero to one of hey how does dental billing work? Because for example for the phone calls we have before we started automating the phone calls we had literally hundreds of hours of our humans talking to the insurance companies. Yeah. And that was what we used to build our agent. And how much we're trying to talk productivity is it like is like twice as productive, three times as productive or how do you think about that?
Yeah. I mean, across the board I you know for all of the workflows I would say about three to five times more effective. Every one person is now three to five times more effective. Does that mean that if you'd owned a services business and then you did this, you'd make like three times as much or or how do you think about that? Maybe not just the margin, but also the productivity of the employees, so they're able to handle so much more volume, right? And so, you know, I think it's really cool when we see, you know, we have a couple of practices that are growing really fast. They went from like, we started working with them when they had two locations and now they have like five or six. And it used to be one human that was on that account and it's still just one human. And I think that's exciting because when they go to seven or eight, I still think it's going to be one human and you can charge them more if they're doing more things though. So, exactly. And so I think it you do start to see it bleed into margin, but it does take a little bit more time.
Is the AI just getting a lot better every month or two or is it about the same or how like how's the rate of improvement? It's like a lot more data integrations. The AI is obviously becoming more accurate and it's like it's handling more of the long tale of edge cases of which like in this industry there are a bunch, right? And I would also say that like part of this is like productivity and margin improvement, but actually I think like we put a lot of effort into automating in service of margin and productivity, but actually we've seen like an equal amount of improvement in just overall quality and accuracy of the service. And the reason is because like like for a human services based business, it's very hard to ensure quality when like there's a different person servicing your account and it's like all about the training and it's all about you know like standards and SOPs and stuff. But when we're able to encode best practices directly into the LLM, then we know that it's doing high quality work all of the time and it's something that we can guarantee across like thousands of different clients. So you're making the service just way better. So Dennis working with you, you're just going to get much better service. Does it make sense for you guys at some point to like buy other billing businesses that exist and have a bunch of clients and just make them like way better and worth way more?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think the way we think about it now is like we did it once and we're going to keep on growing this and then eventually we're going to know what our LTV CAC is and then if you know sending out cash in these lock boxes, you know, once we run out of these ideas. Yeah. I mean, I think not only that, I could imagine a world where we white label the software to these other billing agencies and say, "Hey, you know, we have all these other services like card spend, bank accounts, bookkeeping, and say, hey, you guys have all this distribution in your region. Yeah, we'll just white label the software and then you guys help us increase the productivity of the practice and we grow with that. That could work. Maybe we just buy them. But yeah, let's just figure out I'm down to buy them. Cost of is always there's always a famous like the cost of like time is greater than the cost of cost and just like get bigger faster, right? And it's like but but I love that you're starting with let's be like especially because you come from your mother being in the industry. Let's like be the best thing possible for the dentist. And that's that's a really cool place to start from that you care about what they're doing. And I think that's been, you know, I jokingly say our marketing budget is actually our customer success budget. Dentists have this one unique shared quality is that they all went to dental school. So every dentist, every one of our customers knows 30, 50, 200 dentists. When we do a fantastic job recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars, guess which group shot they're telling like, "Hey, I can probably buy a new Porsche." Like, you know, and why? It's probably because of Daydream, right? And I and uh yeah, so I I like to keep that going for as long as we can. Well, you guys are crushing it. It's going to change how how dentists and patients experience that. And then the ending here for optimism for America like what other trends should investors and builders be paying attention to? What is what has this taught you guys from doing this?
Two things. Uh one is the power of American small business is still alive and well. I mean, we see it every day where we are working with dentists who are suddenly you know technology historically has left these SMBs out. We live in a small business owner to grow their business and not to actually knowledge to be able to grow. And I think that's super exciting to me is in all of these small towns that we we serve, you know, these dentists, they feel like they need a lifeline. And for the first time, technology is not something they're scared about. They're excited about it. It might actually help them build their business. Um, and then the second trend, which I think is maybe counterintuitive these days, people say AI is going to come and take all of the jobs, right? That's like a um maybe the negative case for AI. What we actually see is the opposite. We see our billers becoming more empowered to do more work. We see them working on the business. Our billers, you know, we have one in eight people on our billing team, they're military spouses, right? These are in small towns in, you know, Missouri, um, who are suddenly growing dental practices across the country. A lot of them they counted themselves out of the workforce. May maybe they started families or they you know wanted to work remotely. We got a chance to bring them back into the fold and help them give them the tools to be able to serve more customers. And I think um people worry that AI is going to take everything. I actually think we see the bullcase every day where you know a mom in in Missouri City is now a prompt engineer and working for us and not only that she's going back to school to be a software engineer at night. And I think that's that's the American dream we see every day. That's amazing. Well, that's a great optimistic note to end it on. AI creating more jobs and making small business better. I'm I'm bullish on America with that. Thank you, guys. Thank you.