Curasept - Artificial intelligence is your junior colleague and an ally for education!

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, and seems to be pervading everything. Our dental and periodontal professions must surely be looking at how it will affect oral health.

In this series of interviews, the European Federation of Periodontology is exploring what our partners are doing, or perhaps NOT doing with AI.

In this interview, we talk to Alice Goddi, digital and communication manager at Curasept.

Curasept is as much about reaching out to the public and educating it, as it is about mouthwash and toothbrushes.  It is in this area that Alice Goddi is taking baby steps to hire AI to help!

“We are studying it, because if we decide to use it in one or more of our processes, we must first know which ones can actually be affected by artificial intelligence and how. Then we can make a plan. Currently, we are trying to use it to improve access to our content."

Goddi wants AI to help make accessing information for the public much more effective. “There's something more. It can be used to generate meta descriptions for videos and pictures. And this is important, because if you have a picture or a video on your website, for instance, and there's a meta description, that means the people out there can use their voice to look up  your contents, or if they are doing research, search engines find them better. If there's a meta description for a picture, they can actually know what’s in the picture. That's what we're using right now. It’s an initial step.”

Educating the public is core to Curasept’s mission, which is much more people than products. This is where Curasept is considering applications at first.

“I mean, of course, we produce products. But one of the things we invest more time and resources on is communicating to people, making them understand how important knowledge is. Oral health is still considered, you know, a second type of health.”

Alice Goddi elaborates on this. “What we're trying to do is to raise awareness with people.”

“Artificial intelligence becomes a sort of synthetic colleague, a robo colleague. We used to actually watch the video and roll out the script. We had subtitles, and then we had to cut it and correct it. Now, what we do is we put the video in our system. Thanks also to our IT guys, of course. We just need to check it."

That last sentence is crucial for Alice Goddi, absolutely vital.

“Curasept is very careful though to make sure that it scrutinises any AI generated content as you would supervise a junior colleague!”

Of course, as AI develops, Curasept would like it to take on more “senior” colleague roles, but that is for the future and there is no timescale. “I'm trying to understand. I don't know yet what processes can be affected already in five years’ time, and we may need to wait more time to have an actual change, because I think when there's a technology like that, you don't have to rush it.”

She is conscious of the risk of trying AI just because it is trendy. “Everything has to be consistent with our mission, of course, and our values. As one of our values is quality, we must make sure that the output is of quality and as our value of quality is connected to improving, we must make sure that we improve every time.”

AI may learn, but so, believes Goddi, do humans have to learn too, especially what to input into the AI!  My colleagues and I, we are following courses. We are doing some training and we try things.”

Alice Goddi uses a great analogy to explain the thinking behind this.

“It’s a little bit like having a driving license. I mean, the car is very useful. It can take you from point A to Point B. But before you go there, if you don't want to have an accident, you need to know how to drive it.”

What of the next five or so years. Can Alice Goddi do a bit of crystal ball gazing?

“I hope to make more personalized contents for people from our website because our website is our core. And up to now, we're trying to do as much personalized content as we can for professionals as well as for patients, but it's not artificial intelligence driven yet."

Education and prevention are key for Curasept and getting clear messages to the general public is paramount.  Is there a role for the EFP to help enhance the use of AI and train people how to use it effectively?

“Absolutely. I think that it would be amazing if there could be some workshops on artificial intelligence together, where we have maybe companies and doctors talking about how they use artificial intelligence,” says Alice Goddi. She goes on: “And so maybe we can just share our information and get ideas out there. I think workshops would be a very good way.”

Over to you, EFP!