More than 25,000 people attend the Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting every year. McCormick Place in February is cold outside and overwhelming inside — a half-mile of booths, continuing ed sessions running all day, and the kind of foot traffic that makes you realize dental is a much bigger industry than it looks from the outside.
This was our second conference in as many months. We came in with lessons from Denver and left with new ones.
Rocky Mountain was a learning experience. Chicago is a crucible. You get maybe 90 seconds with most people who stop — long enough to say one true thing and make them curious enough to ask a question. If you can't do that, they keep walking.
We got better at it by day two.
The thing that worked: "Your front desk probably misses 30% of calls. Marea answers the ones they can't, books the appointment, and puts the summary in your system before morning." Not a single person who heard that walked away immediately.
The first was with a hygienist who was running a booth for a patient communication platform two rows over. She was curious about what we did — not as a potential customer, but because she'd heard dentists complain about exactly this problem for years. She said: "The tools they have right now weren't built for dental. They were built for some other industry and then sold to dental." She wasn't wrong, and it was a useful reminder of what we're actually competing against.
The second was with a practice manager from a Chicago-area group who had tried three different AI tools in 2025 and dropped all three. Her feedback was blunt: "None of them handled the edge cases. A call about a dental emergency at 2am isn't a scheduling call. The AI would just try to book it." We spent a long time talking through how Marea handles urgency detection and live escalation. She booked a demo on the spot.
There were more AI vendors at Midwinter this year than last, by most accounts. Everything from AI-generated treatment plans to AI-powered x-ray analysis to AI chatbots for websites. The category has gotten noisy.
What we noticed: most of them are solving problems that dentists feel lukewarm about. An AI that helps read x-rays is interesting; an AI that means you don't miss a call at 7pm on a Friday is urgent. The difference in how practices responded to those demos was visible from across the aisle.
We're comfortable in the urgent category.
We brought the same one-pager we used in Denver. By end of day one we knew it wasn't right for this crowd. Chicago skews more toward multi-location practices and DSOs — the dental groups managing five or ten locations who care less about individual call volume and more about consistency across sites.
We had the answers to those questions, but we weren't leading with them. That's on us.
For the next show, we're building separate materials for solo practices vs. multi-location. The underlying product is the same — the story you tell a solo dentist who's returning calls during lunch is different from the story you tell a DSO operations director who needs every location answering calls the same way.
If you were at Midwinter and stopped by — thank you. If we had a conversation and you haven't followed up yet, the demo link is right here. And if you're heading to Yankee Dental in Boston, we'll see you there.
Takes minutes to set up. Nothing to install. Your existing PMS stays exactly where it is.