What actually happened to the team when AI arrived at a dental front desk.

Rianna Thompson, Head of Sales and Marketing at Damira Dental Studios, sent me a voice note on the first day. Then another one the next morning. And the morning after that. By her own admission, she spent most of that first week glued to every single patient conversation.

Nothing else got a look in. A few days earlier, Damira had become the first dental group in the world to beta test Boxly's AI Front Desk across their entire estate: 44 practices, live patients, real bookings. A beta is a live trial where the product is still being shaped by what the team learns each day.

Their contact centre was fielding around 3,000 calls a day. Nikaisha Anane-Busia, Damira's Contact Centre Manager, and her team of 56 were handling everything: bookings, cancellations, NHS availability, directions, down to which bus stop to get off at. Around 40% of those calls were repetitive admin. Each advisor was getting through upwards of 100 patients a day, and talk-time targets were slipping. Nikaisha's team wanted to look after patients. Instead, they were drowning in the same handful of questions on a loop.

Jobs, targets, and a clinical question

Nobody at Damira pretended the introduction of AI was straightforward. Nikaisha's team were unsettled. Rianna's sales team, who manage all inbound leads, were worried about what it meant for their numbers. As Rianna put it: the worry is always that robots are going to come and steal your jobs.

There was a clinical question too. This is healthcare. If AI gets a patient interaction wrong, it's not a bad review on Google. It's a risk. Tom Simons, Damira's Operations Director, was clear: those risks needed to be eliminated if the beta was going to continue. Fair enough.

Day one

Within days, Rianna's excitement made a lot more sense. Diaries that had sat empty until the 8am scramble were already filling up when the team walked in. Patients had booked themselves in overnight. The callback request forms that used to pile up each morning dropped sharply: patients were sorting themselves out online, whenever suited them. And the clinical concerns Tom had raised? Daily review calls between the Damira and Boxly teams tracked every issue, logging mistakes and making sure nothing systemic slipped through. The more the team watched AI Front Desk handle real conversations, the more confident they became.

That chaotic first hour of the morning, when everyone rings at once, had calmed down. Half of all AI Front Desk interactions were happening outside office hours, with patients who would never have reached the contact centre anyway.

Better work, not less work

Rianna's sales team were bracing for fewer leads. They got fewer leads. But the ones that came through were worth far more. With emergency bookings and routine exams being handled by AI Front Desk, what landed on their desks were Invisalign consultations, implant enquiries, high-ticket treatments. Patients who already knew the pricing, already understood their options, and were ready to talk properly. Better leads, better conversations, better conversion rates.

Nikaisha's contact centre saw the same pattern. The routine calls disappeared and what remained was work that actually needed them: complex clinical queries, multi-treatment plans, diary optimisation. KPI pressure eased because every remaining call was worth more. After so long answering the same questions hundreds of times a week, her team were finally doing the job they'd signed up for.

A new role entirely

Damira took the bold step many groups wouldn't. They removed phones from practice reception desks entirely.

Damira's contact centre (Nikaisha's team) handles the centralised call volume. But each practice also has reception staff on the ground, who were splitting their time between patients standing in front of them and phones ringing behind them. With AI Front Desk now handling the routine enquiries and bookings online, Damira redesigned the in-practice role. Reception staff became patient care coordinators: spending their time with patients face to face, discussing treatments properly, rather than being pulled away every thirty seconds by a ringing phone.

It changed what the job actually is. Not someone juggling a queue and a switchboard. A patient-facing role with time to listen, time to explain, time to care. It's made the work more rewarding and more varied. For a sector struggling with recruitment and retention, that matters.

Rianna's moment

Rianna describes one moment from the first week that stayed with her. A patient got in touch through AI Front Desk on behalf of her son, who had additional needs and was scared of the dentist. The system responded with empathy, offered appointments at quieter times, and flagged the situation to the front-of-house team so they could prepare. Rianna called us straight away. That, she said, was the moment she knew they'd made the right decision. Nobody lost their job. The work just got better.