AI exposure: Dental Hygienists
Administer oral hygiene care to patients. Assess patient oral hygiene problems or needs and maintain health records. Advise patients on oral health maintenance and disease prevention. May provide advanced care such as providing fluoride treatment or administering topical anesthesia.
Reading this score
computedAt 21.7% of weighted task load, Dental Hygienists sits at the 40th percentile, below the point where a job's centre of gravity has moved. 61.2% of what this role does is untouched, meaning current systems cannot produce that work at all, whatever the commercial incentive.
What holds the line here is accountability. Across this occupation's 16 tasks it averages 2.34 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, someone licensed has to sign the work. Capability and permission are different things. Where a statute or a professional body requires a named, liable human to approve the output, the work can be drafted by a machine and still require the person.
The most exposed thing this job does is Maintain patient recall system, at 83.3%. The least is Make impressions for study casts, at 0.0%. A gap of 83.3% between two parts of the same job is the reason this index publishes at task level. An occupation-wide number would have hidden both.
Within healthcare practitioner and technical occupations, this one is more exposed than most. The median across the 89 roles in the group is 18.4%, and only 24 of them score higher than this. Occupational families are not uniform, and the spread inside them is often wider than the gap between them.
What would move this score. Of 16 tasks, 5 are currently banded exposed, 1 assisted and 10 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take robotics cheap and reliable enough to deploy at scale, not a better language model. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Where the score comes from
judgedEvery task is scored through the standardised work activities it maps to. These are this occupation’s averages on the six rubric dimensions. Capability is what AI can do; the other five are what stands in the way.
| Dimension | Mean | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 1.47 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 1.91 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 1.59 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 2.34 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.66 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 2.22 | 0-3 |
Task by task
16 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maintain patient recall system. | 83.3% | 16.7% | 0.0% | 4.40 | exposed |
| Record and review patient medical histories. | 53.3% | 46.7% | 0.0% | 4.89 | exposed |
| Chart conditions of decay and disease for diagnosis and treatment by dentist. | 53.3% | 46.7% | 0.0% | 4.55 | exposed |
| Expose and develop x-ray film. | 45.0% | 30.0% | 25.0% | 4.51 | exposed |
| Provide clinical services or health education to improve and maintain the oral health of patients or the general public. | 40.0% | 35.0% | 25.0% | 4.66 | exposed |
| Conduct dental health clinics for community groups to augment services of dentist. | 16.7% | 33.3% | 50.0% | 2.98 | assisted |
| Attend continuing education courses to maintain or update skills. | 15.8% | 9.2% | 75.0% | 4.48 | untouched |
| Feel and visually examine gums for sores and signs of disease. | 6.7% | 18.3% | 75.0% | 4.80 | untouched |
| Feel lymph nodes under patient's chin to detect swelling or tenderness that could indicate presence of oral cancer. | 6.7% | 18.3% | 75.0% | 4.31 | untouched |
| Examine gums, using probes, to locate periodontal recessed gums and signs of gum disease. | 2.5% | 10.0% | 87.5% | 4.79 | untouched |
| Clean calcareous deposits, accretions, and stains from teeth and beneath margins of gums, using dental instruments. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.79 | untouched |
| Apply fluorides or other cavity preventing agents to arrest dental decay. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.47 | untouched |
| Maintain dental equipment and sharpen and sterilize dental instruments. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.47 | untouched |
| Administer local anesthetic agents. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.92 | untouched |
| Remove excess cement from coronal surfaces of teeth. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.83 | untouched |
| Make impressions for study casts. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 2.75 | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
Occupations either side of this one
The four closest scores in the same occupational family, then the four closest anywhere in the index.
Read this carefully. Exposure is not displacement. A high score means current AI systems can produce this work, not that anyone will stop paying a person to do it. Adoption depends on economics, regulation and inertia that this index deliberately does not model. How the score is built.
What this means in practice
Most of this work is not reachable by current systems, so the immediate pressure is on the administrative edges of the role rather than its core: the scheduling, the reporting, the written records. That is where time is recovered.