Robots Are Placing Implants Now. Should You Trust Them?
Dr Jono Michael
Implant & Reconstructive Dentist
Dental Boutique · Sydney, Australia
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About this episode
Robots are placing dental implants in real patients right now, mostly in America, and the profession has split over it. One side says the accuracy is beyond any human hand. The other says we are training a generation of dentists who will not be able to operate when the technology cannot.
Dr Jono Michael is one of the few people who can judge that argument rather than react to it. He is an implant and reconstructive dentist in Sydney, he did his master's in oral implantology at Goethe University in Frankfurt, he uses static guides every week, and robotic assistance was part of his training.
His answer is more interesting than either camp expects. More than half his own work is still freehand. He would not use a guide for the full-arch cases he is known for, because a guide that puts an implant in the right place but leaves it unstable is no good to anyone. And when asked whether he would let a robot place an implant in his own mouth, the answer was two words.
In this conversation
- The four levels of guidance, from freehand to fully robotic, explained plainly
- Why more than half of his own implant work is still freehand
- $200,000 of robot, or twenty minutes of planning: what guidance actually costs
- Why he will not guide a full-arch case, and what cumulative error does to all-on-four
- The accuracy numbers: around 1mm deviation at the entry point, 1.4mm at the tip
- Why a 2026 meta-analysis favouring robotics does not settle the argument
- The deskilling question, and the amalgam skill he was never taught
- Freehand first, static guides after twenty to fifty implants, robotics after several hundred
- The patient nobody is asking: will they even consent to a robot?
- “Would you let a robot place an implant in your own mouth?” “Not today.”
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