Eleanor Pittard explains the new skill set dental technicians and lab owners need in a dawning era of AI and automation.
If you’re a dental lab and you think AI is just some sci-fi buzzword, put the scepticism away. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already sneaking into your workbench (or soon will), and whether you like it or not, it’s forcing a rethink of what being a ‘technician’ even means.
According to a 2025 forecast for the UK dental-device and lab equipment market, uptake of CAD/CAM systems, 3D printing and digital imaging is accelerating fast – and labs investing in digital workflows are being touted as the future.
By 2030, many labs will be neither dusty low-lit workshops nor glass-fronted showrooms – they’ll be hybrid digital-studios. As diagnostics shift more digital, technicians will spend less time grinding stone and more time polishing pixels (and polishing actual ceramics when it really counts).
What AI can (and can’t) do
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