People ask me all the time how they can use AI in their business. My honest answer is "absolutely everywhere", which is true but useless on its own. So here is a real example from our own business: how we used AI to recruit a new member of our helpdesk team, and turned what is normally weeks of intensive work into a few hours.
I am sharing it because it is the kind of practical, behind-the-scenes use of AI that actually moves the needle, and because recruitment is a process almost every practice owner recognises.
What hiring usually looks like
Expanding the helpdesk would normally mean placing an advert on Indeed, then wading through every applicant by hand, arranging video calls, setting technical tests, running in-person interviews, and finally working through contracts, references and due diligence. It is high-volume, repetitive work, and the volume is the problem. This time we had 182 applicants. Reading, comparing and ranking 182 people fairly by hand is a genuinely large job, and it is exactly the sort of task where tiredness and gut feeling start to creep in.
Defining the criteria, then letting AI apply them
Some people find the idea of AI in recruitment uncomfortable. I would argue the opposite. The hard, important thinking still has to be done by a human: you have to define your criteria properly and honestly, deciding what actually matters for the role. Once those criteria are clear, having AI apply them consistently to every single applicant is a strength, not a risk.
I will admit my own bias. I have always leaned slightly towards "oh, give them a go, they seem keen". That instinct is well meant, but it is not the criteria. An AI sticks to what you asked for and applies it to applicant 182 with the same attention it gave applicant 1.
The workflow, step by step
Here is roughly how it ran.
Sifting 182 down to 20
We used Claude to do the initial sift directly against the applicants on Indeed. I gave it the criteria and asked it to read and rank everyone. In a few hours, 182 applicants became a shortlist of 20. That stage alone would normally swallow days.
Video interviews scored on the answers
From that shortlist, AI generated the questions for video interviews. We then fed the full interview transcripts back in and asked it to score each candidate against the criteria. The point here is important: it scored what was actually said in response to the questions. No warm, chatty rapport tipped the scales one way or the other. That took us down to a handful of people for in-person interviews.
In-person interviews, then a human decision
For the final stage, AI drafted both the technical questions and the "person" questions. We recorded those interviews too and fed them back in for processing. At this point I deliberately did not hand the final call to the AI. Instead it gave me an excellent summary of the whole journey: every score, and a clear view of where each candidate was strong and where they were weaker. A person made the decision, but a far better informed one.
Contracts and due diligence
For the closing admin, contract drafting, updating details, references and due diligence, we used Microsoft Copilot to pull it together quickly.
So, our first AI employee
And so, here is to our first AI employee. No, not a bot. A real human being, recruited with hours of work rather than days and weeks. The person is real and the judgement was ours. AI simply did the heavy lifting and kept us honest against our own criteria.
That, for me, is the big gain almost everywhere you point this technology. It shrinks months of work into hours, and hours of work into minutes, while freeing you to spend your attention on the decisions that genuinely need a human.
If you run a dental practice and you are wondering where AI could realistically help, this is the sort of thing we think about every day. We already build AI into the tools we run for practices, including DentalDial.AI for the phones, and we are always happy to talk through where it fits and where it does not. Take a look at our current vacancies if you fancy joining the team, or get in touch for a straight conversation about putting AI to work in your practice.