Research: 78% of Patients Know of Dental AI But Only 8% Have Had It

Ask a few hundred dental patients whether they’d let a robot treat them and you don’t get a yes or a no. You get a boundary. At a teaching hospital in Jeddah, nearly nine in ten were fine with a machine taking their X-rays and around six in ten with one working out the diagnosis. Ask the same people about a filling and support halves. About an extraction it’s effectively gone — and the line isn’t where you’d expect.

Key takeaways

• Patients accepted a machine taking radiographs (86%) and contributing to diagnosis (63%), but rejected one doing fillings (32% accepted), root canals (15%) or gum and implant surgery (11%).
• The dividing line was not difficulty. It was permanence, whitening and a scale-and-polish were accepted, while anything that drills, removes or permanently moves a tooth was not.Dental anxiety had no measurable bearing on any of it.
• Nervous patients were no more opposed to robotic dentistry than relaxed ones; the stated objection was trust, not fear.
• Around 92% of participants had never experienced AI-assisted dental care, so these are opinions about an unfamiliar idea rather than reactions to something patients have lived through.

Where patients drew the line

Najla Al-Dabbagh and colleagues at King Abdulaziz University surveyed 807 adult patients in the waiting areas of their dental teaching hospital between July and December 2023, using a 23-item questionnaire adapted from earlier studies and piloted on 30 people. Ninety-four percent of those approached completed it, and men and women were almost evenly split. Participants were asked, procedure by procedure, what they’d accept a machine doing on its own. Laid out in order, the answers form a clean gradient.

Procedure	Would accept a machine alone	What it does to the tooth
Taking X-rays	86%	Nothing — imaging only
Diagnosis and treatment planning	63%	Nothing — assessment only
Non-surgical gum therapy (scale and polish)	61%	Removes deposits, not tooth
Teeth whitening	59%	Changes colour, surface only
Fillings and sealants	32%	Drills into the tooth
Braces	26%	Moves teeth permanently
Extraction	16%	Removes the tooth
Root canal	15%	Removes the nerve
Gum and implant surgery	11%	Cuts gum and bone

Percentages of 807 participants who would accept each procedure performed by robotics or AI alone. Adapted from Table 4 in Al-Dabbagh et al., The Open Dentistry Journal 2024 (CC BY 4.0). Right-hand column added by The Oral Health.

Whitening is a cosmetic procedure and a filling is a routine one, yet whitening cleared 59% and fillings managed 32%. Scaling involves instruments in the mouth for half an hour and cleared 61%. What separates the top of that list from the bottom is whether the procedure permanently alters the tooth. Patients will let a machine look, measure and clean. They will not let one cut.

The objection was trust, not fear

Among those unwilling to be treated by a robot, the most common reason given was simply not trusting a machine to deliver the treatment, followed by safety, the novelty of the idea, and the expectation that a machine would show no understanding or compassion. Cost came well down the list. Fear of dental treatment in general came second from last, and dissatisfaction with a previous result came last of all.

That ordering matters, because the survey also checked whether dental anxiety predicted any of this. It didn’t. Participants rated their own fear of treatment, and that rating had essentially no relationship with how open they were to robotics. Self-rated dental hygiene showed the same nothing. The one factor that did separate people was gender: men were consistently more open than women, while age, education, nationality and occupation made no measurable difference.

The authors’ own reading lands on control rather than capability:

Patients believe it is critical for a dentist to have control over the R&AI application.

Al-Dabbagh and colleagues, King Abdulaziz University, writing in The Open Dentistry Journal — https://doi.org/10.2174/0118742106339605240918065914

That fits the rest of the data. The single most popular arrangement in the whole survey wasn’t a robot or a dentist working alone. It was a dentist working with robot assistance, which around three in five participants backed.

The same line shows up elsewhere

This is one survey in one country, so the question is whether the pattern holds elsewhere. It does, twice over. Nasim Ayad, Shankeeth Vinayahalingam and colleagues at Münster, Berlin and Nijmegen surveyed 265 German patients and found the same instinct expressed differently: asked about a workflow where AI analyses the images first and the dentist reviews them afterwards, 85% agreed. Machine looks, human decides. Their overall summary was positive:

Overall, patients showed a positive attitude towards the use of AI in dentistry.

Ayad et al., University Hospital Münster and Charité Berlin, Head & Face Medicine 2023. Two co-authors co-founded a dental AI company, which the paper discloses — https://doi.org/10.1186/s13005-023-00368-z

The Pew Research Center found the same split in a nationally representative survey of 11,004 US adults. Roughly two-thirds said they would want AI used in their own skin cancer screening — a looking task — while around six in ten said they would not want an AI-driven robot performing their surgery. Pew also found the gender gap that turned up in Jeddah, with women markedly less comfortable than men, and reported that three-quarters of Americans worry more about providers adopting AI too fast than too slowly. Their framing of the overall mood was blunt: caution remains a dominant theme in public views.

The professional side matches. The American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute reported in July 2026 that around one in five US dentists use AI for imaging and diagnostics, while fewer than one in twenty use it for treatment recommendations. Dentists and patients have drawn the boundary in roughly the same place, independently.

What this means in practice

If you’re a patient

Your instinct here is well supported. Letting software read an image before your dentist does is low-risk, already routine in a fair number of practices, and removes nobody from the decision. Nothing that drills, extracts or operates is being done by a machine on its own in general practice, and the evidence that it should be doesn’t exist yet. If you want to know what’s running on your X-rays, ask at your next appointment.

If you’re a dentist

The practical takeaway is about sequencing. Patients are most comfortable with AI exactly where it is most mature — imaging and diagnostic support — so leading with that costs nothing in trust. The survey’s stated objection was trust and an expectation that a machine offers no compassion, neither of which is answered by a better algorithm. Both are answered by explaining what the software does and making clear that you remain responsible for the diagnosis. Worth noting too that dental anxiety didn’t predict resistance, so the nervous patient isn’t the one who needs the conversation.

What nobody knows yet

Whether any of this predicts behaviour is untested — saying you’d decline a robot filling in a waiting-room questionnaire is not the same as declining one when it’s offered, cheaper and available on the day. Nobody has asked these questions of patients who have actually been treated with robotic or AI-assisted systems, which is the group whose answers would matter most. And no one has tested whether the acceptance gradient shifts once a procedure is explained properly, rather than left to whatever the words “root canal” conjure up.

The bottom line

Among 807 patients at one Saudi teaching hospital, nearly all of whom had never encountered the technology, acceptance of robotics and AI tracked almost perfectly with whether the procedure permanently alters the tooth. It’s a snapshot of stated attitudes at one site, with some figures that don’t reconcile between abstract and tables — but the same boundary turns up in German and US surveys run independently.

Common questions

Would patients let a robot do their dental treatment?

It depends entirely on the procedure. In this survey of 807 dental patients, 86% accepted a machine taking their X-rays and 63% accepted help with diagnosis. Only 16% accepted a machine extracting a tooth, and 11% accepted gum or implant surgery.

Why do patients accept AI for diagnosis but not for treatment?

The dividing line was permanence rather than difficulty. Procedures that look, measure or clean were accepted; anything that drills, removes or permanently moves teeth was rejected. Trust in the machine was the most commonly stated concern, ahead of safety and unfamiliarity.

Are nervous dental patients more opposed to robotic dentistry?

No. The survey found no measurable relationship between a patient’s self-rated dental anxiety and their acceptance of robotics and AI. Fear of dental treatment also sat near the bottom of the list of stated concerns, well behind trust and safety.

Do patients want a dentist involved when AI is used?

Yes. Support was strongest for a dentist treating with robot assistance, backed by around three in five participants. Roughly the same proportion said a dentist would deliver better results than a robot alone, and the authors concluded that patients want the dentist in control.

Source

Al-Dabbagh N, Alnowailaty Y, Abed H, Sharka R, Alhilou A, Almarghlani A. Patients’ Perception of using Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Dentistry: A Cross-sectional Study. The Open Dentistry Journal 2024;18:e18742106339605. https://doi.org/10.2174/0118742106339605240918065914

Published 23 October 2024. Open access under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence, so the full text and all seven tables are free to read and reuse with attribution.