🦷 Welcome to the agent era

February 17, 2026

Good morning. The average dentists’ compensation in the U.S. rose 10% last year to $318,000, according to DentalPost’s 2026 Dental Salary Survey Report. 

Interestingly, median comp for dentists actually fell by 6% to $225,000, suggesting a growing split between top earners (who are pulling up the average) and the rest of the field.

Inside this issue:

- What you need to know about AI agents 
- Is your software held together with duct tape?

⏰ Your reading time today: 6 minutes 51 seconds

🏆 Enjoy your coffee break with Word of Mouth, a dental-themed word game inspired by Wordle.

MARKETS

📉 3D Systems Corp ($DDD) – 2.08 | -0.10 (4.59%)
📉 Align Technology ($ALGN) – 186.77 | -1.04 (0.55%)
📈 Colgate-Palmolive ($CL) – 96.67 | +2.61 (2.77%)
📉 Dentsply Sirona ($XRAY) – 12.95 | -0.62 (4.53%)
📉 Envista Holdings ($NVST) – 28.97 | -0.19 (0.65%)
📉 Henry Schein ($HSIC) – 78.19 | -1.17 (1.47%)
📈 Park Dental Partners ($PARK) – 19.16 | +2.38 (14.18%)
📉 Straumann Holding AG (STMN.SW) – CHF 96.60 | -4.35 (4.31%)
📉 Weave Communications ($WEAV) – 5.60 | -0.62 (9.97%)

Stock data reflects market close yesterday (or 02/13/2026 for U.S.-traded stocks), showing changes over the past five days.

THE DRILL DOWN

💵 Newly released data shows national dental spending ties record high of $189B in 2024, showing a 4% growth from 2023, with significant increases in private insurance and government program expenditures. The dental economy has good bones.

📈 Federal spending bill boosts oral healthcare funding, earmarking new funding for oral health workforce programs, CDC oral health activities, and dental research, along with $50M in community project funding to expand dental infrastructure.

💰 Massachusetts proposes $1,000 cap on Medicaid dental coverage, aiming to save $120M in the 2027 budget but raising concerns over patient access to essential services. Bay State puts a cap on coverage.

🚫 California Dental Board halts orthodontic assistant training proposal, responding to pushback from industry groups that opposed moving away from an in-office training model. 

📊 Illinois law expands dental private equity reporting requirements, targeting firms with $10M in revenue and eliminating the expiration date for current reporting laws.

🦷 ADA voices concerns over potential Medicare changes, urging CMS to maintain oversight of Advantage benefits to ensure transparency and access for beneficiaries.

🚰 Arizona lawmakers advance a fluoride ban, with a committee advancing a law to prohibit the use of fluoride in state public water systems to a full Senate vote. Will Arizona ditch its rinse cycle?

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TECH

AI enters its agent era

The AI tools DSOs have been experimenting with are growing up fast, and they’re making the chatbots we’ve all played around with look like that ancient laptop you’ve got stashed in a closet somewhere (and will, for some reason, never throw away).

What's happening: The big AI players have all shipped "agent infrastructure" products in the past 18 months. These take AI capabilities beyond the chatbot interface by connecting the technology to your existing tools—your PMS, your email, your billing software—and then letting it take multi-step actions with minimal hand-holding.

  • Think of the difference between asking a smart assistant "What's on my schedule?" and having it reschedule your no-show, text the next patient on the waitlist, and update the chart.

Why it matters: AI agents could eliminate the trade-off practices have traditionally faced between expanding and maintaining high operational standards without adding extra costs to the balance sheet.

  • Signature Dental Partners saw collections climb and turnaround days shrink after integrating AI into its revenue cycle, with RCM staff going from managing five practices each to as many as twelve.

  • The Dental Group of Chicago hit 87% automated payment posting on peak days within its first month of adopting AI-powered automations.

  • VideaHealth rolled out its AI diagnostic support platform across Aspen Dental's 1,100+ practices in just six weeks, reporting a 12% bump in treatment acceptance at pilot offices.

What it means for you: AI agents aren’t going to be filling cavities anytime soon, but they shine in the back office when it comes to tackling some of the biggest pain points dental operators are experiencing. 

  • Staffing shortages: AI agents can now handle calls, texts, and web chats around the clock and deal with common patient requests like booking appointments, answering FAQs, and filling cancellations without a human touching the phone.

  • Overflowing admin: From auto-drafting clinical notes during the appointment to running insurance eligibility checks before the patient even sits down, AI agents are chipping away at the paperwork pile that buries clinical and front-office teams alike.

  • Revenue leakage: AI-powered RCM tools are catching the money that slips through manual processes by scrubbing claims before submission, flagging coding inconsistencies, auto-posting payments, and triaging denials for faster follow-up. 

What’s next: Operators that can orchestrate agents as a system rather than a collection of siloed tools will unlock even bigger gains. The technology has advanced to the point where it’s possible to connect clinical AI (imaging, charting) to operational AI (scheduling, billing, communication) so that a flagged finding flows seamlessly into a treatment plan, which triggers a pre-authorization check, which schedules the follow-up—all with just one or two staff confirming key decisions along the way.

BUSINESS BITES

👔 Notable leadership changes: DentalXChange names Anisha Madan as its new CFO and Eugene Katz joins Pearl as Senior Vice President of Customer Success.

​​💵 Orthodontic AI company DentalMonitoring secured $100M in investments from Lazard Elaia Capital and ISALT, with the company saying the funding would allow it to invest in research and explore dental applications for its software outside of orthodontics.

📈 Invisalign maker Align Technology reports more than $1B of revenue in Q4 of 2025, up 5.3% from the fourth quarter of the previous year, with an operating margin of 14.8%.

🏅 Forbes ranked three dental companies among its best midsize employers for 2026, including Align Technology (48), Dentsply Sirona (197), and Delta Dental of California and Affiliates (246).

LAST ISSUE’S POLL RESULTS

TECH

Is your dental software held together with duct tape?

Some of the most important data connections in your practice management stack may not really be connections at all but bots pretending to be humans, clicking through screens and copying fields like a temp worker who never takes a break. And just like a temp worker, those bots are prone to mistakes.

Catch up: A meaningful share of dental software integrations still rely on a technique called robotic process automation (RPA) to move data between systems, where software "robots" log in to applications using stored credentials, navigate user interfaces, read screen elements, and copy-paste data from one system to another.

  • RPA functionality is common in older software built when "integration" often meant CSV exports and hiring someone to copy and paste data manually.

The modern alternative to RPAs are application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are purpose-built channels that let systems talk directly to each other in a structured, secure, and machine-to-machine handshake. That means data is always communicated in a standard, predictable way (and there’s no risk of an “integration” being broken by a stray pop-up or an app redesign). 

  • APIs are table stakes in sectors with mature software ecosystems but still relatively new to some industries where legacy software is widely used. 

What’s happening: The dental industry is in the middle of a slow but steady migration from RPAs to APIs with major vendors formalizing API programs. 

Why it matters: The migration from RPAs to APIs has happened across much of the software world for the same reasons it’s now happening in dental—because building your business on a foundation of RPAs is setting yourself up for trouble down the road.

  • Reliability: RPAs are prone to breaking when a vendor updates its interface. A moved button, a changed label, an unexpected pop-up—any of these can derail an automation that was working fine yesterday. APIs transmit data in a standard way using code that can be tested before customers ever interact with it.

  • Security: APIs are built to comply with HIPAA requirements, like access controls and audit trails. RPA bots, on the other hand, typically log in with stored credentials—sometimes shared accounts—and operate through the same login as your staff, creating audit headaches and security vulnerabilities.

  • Cost: RPA is cheap to start but expensive to maintain. PwC found that human oversight of bot controls works fine at three robots, becomes "overwhelming" at 30, and "untenable at 300." The extra precautions needed to overcome reliability and security issues can slow down your workflows, require more human oversight, and can never fully eliminate the risk of downtime (or worse, security breaches).

Bottom line: If your tech stack includes integrations that work by "logging in like a user," you're not alone, but you should be planning the exit. Modern organizations are treating RPAs as temporary infrastructure and migrating to APIs ASAP before a system-breaking interface update or a security incident makes the decision for them.

🗳️ The Check-up:

⬆ VOTE: Has your organization deployed AI agents?

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CLINICAL NOTES

🤖 An AI model may outperform both dentists and traditional neural networks at detecting early-stage caries in panoramic X-rays, according to a study in Scientific Reports that found the model achieved 87.3% mean average precision across all caries stages and processed each image in about 70 milliseconds. Your new second opinion works fast.

🦠 A bacteria associated with gum disease may be linked to breast cancer, with a new study finding that the oral bacterium Fusobacterium nucleatum, a key component of periodontal plaque, appeared to accelerate tumor growth in breast cancer cells with certain genetic mutations.

🪥 Silver complex fluoride (SCF) may offer the caries-fighting power of silver diamine fluoride without the staining, with a new study showing that, in lab testing, SCF matched SDF in limiting bacterial growth and reducing dentin demineralization. Now that’s a silver lining.

FUN AND GAMES

BEYOND THE CUSP