In this episode of the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast, Dr. Eric Block sits down with Sergei Azernikov — Senior Vice President of Software Development at Glidewell Laboratories — whose path to dentistry ran through computer vision research at the Technion in Israel, a postdoc at the University of Michigan, and patient-specific device work on hearing aids and orthopedics at Siemens, before he joined Glidewell as the second member of a software team that now numbers around 200.

The conversation traces Glidewell's early and unglamorous bet on artificial intelligence — a 2015–2017 collaboration with UC Berkeley, and founder Jim Glidewell personally reviewing crowns for hours a day to curate the training data — to where the company stands now: 100% of its crown designs are generated by AI, and a model update that once took months now takes about a week. Sergei and Dr. Block dig into the fast scan / fast mill chairside workflow, why crown proposals and margin detection keep improving, and the long-standing vision of a scan-to-seat process that ultimately becomes a single button click.

The episode also looks ahead — to voice interfaces and virtual assistants in the operatory, to robotics and automated prepping (with a Tesla full-self-driving analogy for how trust builds over time), and to Sergei's bigger thesis: dentistry is missing a true software platform, a "Windows moment" or App Store that would let disconnected systems finally plug and play. They close with advice for the next generation — for dentists, "you cannot afford to stay"; for entrepreneurs, a historically underserved market that is wide open for anyone who can build the connective layer.