Mike's Newsletter | AI Anxiety Hits Teams. Grok Bot Starts Working 24/7.
Welcome Orthoprenuers!
Every week, we bring you the latest in practice management, marketing, profitability, and next-level ortho techniques so you can work smarter, grow faster, and build the practice you want.
In this issue:
🚨 News Update
🦾 Mike’s Prompt
✨ Astro Outlook
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
📢 Juan’s Marketing Tip
🔥 Trending in the OrthoPreneurs Facebook Group
🎙️ The Orthopreneurs Podcast
✨ Final Thought
🚨 News Upadte
😰AI Anxiety Is the Workplace Mental Health Crisis of 2026 — 52% of Workers Are Worried About Their Jobs
According to a 2026 Modern Health survey, 74% of senior managers expect AI to lead to layoffs in their company within three years, and 57% personally fear for their own job security. A Spring Health report found that 24% of employees report worsened mental health due to AI-related information overload, and 23% report a reduced sense of control over their future. Meditopia’s 2026 research shows 52% of U.S. workers are worried about AI’s future impact at work, with 33% feeling overwhelmed. Just 33% of employees strongly agree their employer values their mental health, down from 41% in 2025. The American Psychological Association’s Vaile Wright noted that “there is a lot of fear and anxiety about AI, and in particular fear around AI replacing jobs,” which was a key driver behind the 2,400 mental health care providers at Kaiser Permanente who went on strike in May 2025. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace 2026 report shows worker engagement has fallen to 20% in 2025 — its lowest level since 2020 — with AI anxiety and job security concerns as primary drivers.
Why it matters: If you’re adopting AI in your practice — whether it’s voice agents for recalls, automation for scheduling, or analytics tools — your team is watching. They’re not stupid. They see the technology doing work that used to require people. If you don’t address this directly, you’ll see disengagement, reduced productivity, and retention problems. The research is clear: anxiety rises when change happens fast and people have no control or visibility into what’s coming. The antidote isn’t avoiding AI — it’s transparency. Tell your team what’s changing, why, and what it means for their roles. Help them see how automation frees them from repetitive work to focus on higher-value tasks. Ignore the anxiety and it compounds. Address it head-on and it becomes manageable.
🤖 xAI Launches Grok Bot — First Major Product From SpaceX’s $60B Cursor Acquisition
xAI released Grok Bot on August 12, 2026, the first major product to ship following SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Cursor earlier this year.
Grok Bot is an autonomous agent platform that logs into your apps, executes workflows 24/7 without human intervention, and learns from watching you complete a task once. Setup takes minutes. The platform costs $200/month (Cursor Ultra) or $120/seat for teams. The xAI team is already using Grok Bot internally for sales, support, and operations.
Why it matters: Grok Bot handles repetitive administrative work that doesn’t touch patient data: vendor pricing tracking and alerts, social media scheduling and drafting, financial report organization (P&Ls, expense summaries), continuing education credit tracking and deadline reminders, competitor research and market intelligence, email triage and initial response drafting, supply inventory management and reorder alerts, staff schedule optimization and shift coverage, marketing calendar management. Real example: a plumber (@HouseHackerJon on X) automated work-order intake to booking using Grok Bot, freeing his office team to focus on higher-value work.
🦾 Mike’s Tip of the Week: Have the AI Conversation With Your Team
When to use: Your team is anxious about AI. You’re adopting new tools. They deserve to know what’s coming and why it actually benefits them, not just the bottom line.
How to use: Build a roadmap and what it means for each role.
Prompt:
I'm planning to introduce AI tools into our practice over the next [timeframe].
Here's what we're actually implementing: [describe the specific tools — voice agents, scheduling automation, billing, etc.]
Here's what it will actually change: [what work goes away, what work stays, what new work appears]
Here's what I'm worried about saying: [what concerns you — "Will this replace people?" "Will this feel cold to patients?" etc.]
Here's what I genuinely believe: [why you think this is good for the practice AND for the team]
Help me prepare for this conversation. What should I actually SAY to my team so they understand:
- What's coming and when
- What specific roles/tasks will change
- Why this frees them from [specific repetitive work] so they can focus on [what they're actually good at]
- What this means for their job security and growth
- How we're doing this WITH them, not TO them
What questions will they probably ask? What am I probably not thinking about?
Why this works:
You’re asking it to help you think clearly about your actual roadmap before you have the conversation. That’s the real work — getting honest about what you’re doing, why, and what it means for people.
✨ Astro Outlook: Leo Season Wraps Up, Virgo Season Gets to Work
Week of August 17–23: The week opens slow and a little foggy — a good stretch to rest and take stock rather than force a big decision. Give yourself through mid-week before committing to anything major.
The headline shift: the Sun leaves ♌ Leo and enters ♍ Virgo on August 22, closing out five weeks of visibility-and-confidence energy and opening a stretch focused on details, systems, and follow-through.
The practical moment: If the last few weeks pushed you to be more visible — post more, speak up, put yourself forward — this is where that energy needs a system behind it, or it fades. Virgo season rewards the follow-up, not the announcement.
Best use of the week: Rest early, then once Virgo season opens on the 22nd, turn to the unglamorous work — the process that needs tightening, the report nobody's been reading, the follow-up system that's been more idea than habit.
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
The Sleep & Airway MeetingFri, Dec 04 | Arizona Biltmore, LXR Hotels & Resorts
THE MOST UP-TO-DATE CLINICAL INFORMATION ON SLEEP-DISORDERED BREATHING & AIRWAY.
The Orthopreneurs CE Calendar keeps every major workshop, congress, and study club event in one place — searchable by month, so you can plan your travel and your team's coverage well ahead of time instead of scrambling the week before.
Whether you're chasing CE credits, looking for your next study club, or just want to see what's coming up before you lock in your schedule for the quarter, it's worth a five-minute look every month.
Bookmark the calendar, pick your priorities early, and stop letting CE planning become a last-minute scramble.
📢 Juan’s Maktering Tip
Your Google Business Profile Is Working Harder Than Your Website
Google Business Profile — the free listing with your map pin, reviews, hours, and photos — now drives roughly 29% of all healthcare new-patient leads, more than any other single channel, and that share is growing year over year. Businesses that show up in the local "3-pack" (the top three map results) capture nearly 44% of all local clicks; everyone below that gets a fraction of the attention. Most practices set this profile up once at launch and never touch it again — which is exactly why it's one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost fixes available.
Here's how to actually work the profile instead of letting it sit static:
Check your primary and secondary categories. This is one of the single strongest ranking factors, and most practices default to a generic category instead of the most specific one available.
Keep your review count and rating moving. Profiles with 50+ reviews are dramatically more likely to appear in the local 3-pack than those with fewer than 10 — this is the same review engine from a few issues back, doing double duty for local ranking.
Post something monthly, even something small — a new team member, a before-and-after, a holiday hours update. Profiles with regular posting activity show up in top map results substantially more often than static ones.
Fill in the Q&A section yourself instead of leaving it for random users to populate. Proactively answered questions get more clicks and remove friction before a call even happens.
Keep your name, address, and phone number identical everywhere you're listed — Healthgrades, Zocdoc, your website footer, insurance directories. Inconsistency is a trust signal Google actively penalizes.
Add fresh photos regularly. Updated photo libraries measurably increase how often a profile gets discovered, and it's the fastest five-minute win on this whole list.
The bottom line: This is a free asset most practices already have and rarely maintain. A profile you actually keep current will often out-produce a paid ad campaign, for a fraction of the effort.
🔥Trending in the Orthopreneurs Facebook Group🔥
💬 I’m going to be acquiring a small practice from a retiring doc.
I (perhaps a mistake) offered to pay the retiring doctor a per diem to stay on for as long as 6 months (renewed monthly in 30 day increments). Was planning on fulltime for a month or so to get a firm hand-off to all the patients and then maybe 1 day / week or less to allow them to finish out some cases. Wondering if you would suggest anything different? My sense after going through the purchasing process so far is the retiring doctor is a little checked out and may not be very helpful. Any thoughts much appreciated!
🗣️Sharing experiences can help make the right choice for you!
🎙️ On the Podcast: Orthodontists Are Too Smart for Their Own Good l 5MF
In this episode of Five Minute Friday, I’m challenging one of the most common tendencies I see among orthodontists: taking a proven system or technology and immediately trying to “make it our own.” We’re highly educated, driven, and clinically capable—but those strengths can become weaknesses when we assume we can redesign every workflow better than the people who built and refined it.
As staffing becomes more difficult, the practices that thrive will be the ones that implement technology before they are forced to. My goal is to help you build a more efficient, resilient practice—one that allows you to spend less time working inside the business and more time leading, growing, and enjoying it.
✨ Final Thoughts: Don't Ignore the AI Elephant in the Room.
Your team is anxious about AI. They're watching. They're wondering what's coming and what it means for their jobs.
The worst thing you can do is pretend it's not happening. If you hope to keep them, let them know what you have in mind.
– Mike Vidikan
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