About Tilcao: who builds it, why it exists, and what it refuses to do
Tilcao is a Belgian company building an AI receptionist for dental practices, founded by Martin Michaux, who still takes the demo calls himself. It answers patients by phone and WhatsApp in Dutch, French and English and books into the practice’s own software rather than a parallel calendar. Tilcao is early and pre-pilot, so this site carries no customer logos, no case studies and no results, because none have been measured yet. Talking to us at this stage means helping decide what gets built next, which is the reason to do it rather than a reason to wait.
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Who is behind Tilcao?
Martin Michaux founded Tilcao, and he is the person who takes the demo calls. There is no stock photograph of a team on this page, no advisory board and no list of former employers, because this site prints only what a reader could check. If you book a demo you speak to the person building the product, and you can ask anything on this page and get either a straight answer or an admission that it is not known yet.
That matters more in a pre-pilot company than in an established one. A practice putting an AI in front of its patients is taking a risk on a supplier as much as on a technology, and the honest version of a company page names a person instead of a stock image. The rest of this site is written the same way: what is true, what is not yet true, and where the line between the two sits today.
- Founder: Martin Michaux. He takes the demo calls.
- Company: Belgian, working in Dutch, French and English.
- Product: an AI receptionist for dental practices. Not a practice management system.
- Stage: early, and pre-pilot. No practice is running it on live patient calls yet.
- Evidence on this site: a working demo practice with fictional patients, and nothing that claims to be a measured result.
Why does Tilcao exist?
Because the telephone is the last manual system in a Belgian dental practice. Electronic invoicing has been compulsory for Belgian dentists since 1 September 2025, so the billing layer is already digital and already wired to the RIZIV/INAMI, Belgium’s national health and disability insurance institute. The diary is not. It is still held by one person who is also looking after the patient in the chair, and every call that arrives while they are busy is simply gone.
The pressure on that desk is getting worse rather than better. The federal health department reported in February 2026 that only about 65 per cent of licensed Belgian dentists are effectively active in healthcare, so the licence count badly overstates the capacity that actually exists, and the number of dentists per inhabitant has been falling even as the absolute count rises. When VRT telephoned 40 randomly chosen Flemish practices in March 2023 and tried to book an appointment, 25 of them had a patient stop, and only 3 could offer anything within two months.
Tilcao does not fix a shortage of dentists. Nothing at a front desk can, and a product that claims otherwise is selling something. What it can do is stop a practice losing the demand it already has: the call that rang out at 08:41, the cancellation nobody had time to refill, the recall list that never gets phoned. That is a smaller claim than most of this category makes, and it is the one that survives contact with a real practice.
What results can Tilcao show today?
None, and that is the honest answer. Tilcao is pre-pilot. No Belgian practice is running it on live patient calls yet, so there is no measured reduction in missed calls, no recovered chair hours and no revenue figure, and there will be none here until there is something real to count. Nearly every vendor in this category publishes percentages. Most of them were measured in a different country under a different health system, and they are not evidence about your practice.
What does exist is a product you can test in the browser before you speak to anyone. The demo practice on this site runs the same agent logic that would answer your phone, against a fictional diary with fictional patients. Try to book, move an appointment, cancel one, ask something awkward, or say that you are in pain and watch it decline to assess that and hand over instead. It is a weaker claim than a case study, and a far stronger one than a case study you cannot verify.
When results exist they will be published with the method attached: how many practices, over what period, what counted as a recovered appointment, and what the practice was doing before. A percentage without that is decoration. Until then, the claim discipline on this site is deliberate and it will not loosen because a competitor page looks more confident.
- No customer names and no logo wall. There are no customers to name.
- No testimonials, no reviews, no ratings, no practice count.
- No case studies, and no percentages borrowed from another market.
- No published price, because none has been set. Pricing is per practice and discussed on a call.
- Any worked example on this site is labelled illustrative and prints the assumptions it is built on.
What does Tilcao refuse to do?
Quite a lot, and the list of refusals is the product. Most of what makes an AI safe at a dental front desk is what it declines to do, so the refusals are worth reading before the capabilities. The line is clinical, not technological: a receptionist, human or AI, gathers facts and routes them, and the moment a call stops being about a diary it stops being Tilcao’s call.
No Belgian rule forbids an AI from speaking to patients, and there is no Order of Dentists in Belgium that could have written one. Oversight runs through recognition by FOD/SPF Volksgezondheid and the Provinciale Geneeskundige Commissie, and no Belgian professional association has published a position on AI at the front desk. The guardrails below are therefore a choice rather than a compliance exercise, which is exactly why they should be printed somewhere a dentist can hold us to them.
| Tilcao will not | Why |
|---|---|
| Assess a symptom or judge how urgent it is | A receptionist gathers facts and routes them. Pain and red flags stop the booking and go to a person, following the practice’s own rule |
| Name a condition, recommend a medicine or promise a prescription | That is clinical work and it stays with clinicians, including for anything sold over the counter |
| Quote a tariff it was not given | Convention status can be partial, binding a dentist to the agreed tariffs only at declared times and places, so it can be answered only from the practice’s own configuration |
| Become your practice management system | Appointments are written into the system you already run. Tilcao is a layer across your systems, not a replacement for one |
| Touch eAttest, eFact or MyCareNet | Tilcao is not on the MyCareNet approved-software list, holds no eHealth certificate, and needs neither in order to write an appointment into a diary |
| Hide that it is an AI | Every caller is told in the opening sentence, and anyone who would rather speak to a person is handed over instead of talked round |
| Publish a number this company has not measured | It would be the easiest thing on this site to fake, and the fastest way to lose a practice that later checked |
Why does a Belgian practice need a Belgian product?
Because almost everything a Belgian front desk argues about is specific to Belgium, and a translated product knows none of it. The vocabulary gives it away first. A caller asks whether the dentist is geconventioneerd, meaning bound to the agreed national tariffs, whether the mutualiteit or mutualité, the patient’s health insurance fund, will reimburse, and when the wachtdienst or garde dentaire, the dentist on-call service, is open. A product built for the Netherlands, France or the United States has a word for each of those and no understanding of any of them.
Tilcao works in Dutch, French and English because Belgium does. That is not three versions of a website with one engine underneath. It is one agent that takes the call in the caller’s language and can switch part way through, which in Brussels is an ordinary Tuesday rather than an edge case. The Dutch is meant to sound Flemish and the French Belgian, because the voices were chosen by ear for each language instead of taken from a default.
The detail below is the sort of thing that only turns up when the product is built here. None of it is exotic. All of it is the difference between an agent a Belgian patient trusts on the phone and one that quietly says the wrong thing twice a day.
| A Belgian fact | What it changes at the front desk |
|---|---|
| Convention status can be partial, binding a dentist to the agreed tariffs only at declared times and places | The agent never estimates a tariff. It answers from what the practice configured, or it arranges a callback |
| Reimbursed preventive oral examinations for under-18s must fall in different semesters of the same calendar year | Recall logic has to be semester-aware. Six months since the last visit is the wrong rule in Belgium |
| The mondzorgtraject / trajet de soins buccaux keeps an adult on the lower personal share if they had reimbursed care in the previous calendar year | A lapsed recall costs the patient real money, which is worth saying plainly in the recall message |
| From 1 October 2026, dentists applying electronic third-party payment must verify the patient’s identity at every contact | Every appointment confirmation should remind the patient to bring their ID card |
| The Dutch-language dentist on-call line covers weekends, public holidays and bridge days only, and Wallonia publishes no single number at all | Weekday out-of-hours cover is a national gap. The out-of-hours routing has to be the practice’s own rule, stated correctly and repeated |
| Brussels practices take calls in French, Dutch and English on the same morning | Language is a decision made per call, not a setting chosen once per account |
What is a practice signing up to if it talks to us now?
A conversation about your practice, and a real say in what gets built next. Being early is the offer. The first practices decide which of the six agent roles goes first, what the escalation rule says, which appointment types the agent may book at all, and what it must always hand to a named person. Once that is settled with the first practices it becomes the default for everyone after them, and that is worth considerably more than a discount.
A demo is 30 minutes. Bring your schedule and the questions your front desk would ask; we bring the demo practice. We would rather show the product failing at something honestly than show a slide about it, and if Tilcao is wrong for your practice it is better to establish that in half an hour than three months in.
Nothing about money is hidden here and nothing about it is published. Tilcao has no price list, because a price set before the first pilot would be a number we would have to walk back. Pricing works per practice and is discussed on the call, against what the practice spends on the problem today. Before a single real patient call there is an Article 28 processing agreement to sign, and that is not paperwork to tidy up afterwards.
- You choose which agent role goes first, not us.
- The escalation rule is yours, written in your words, and the agent follows it.
- The knowledge base the agent answers from is yours, and you change it when the practice changes.
- Any workflow can be paused, and a paused workflow does not run.
- You can take the line back at any moment by switching your own call forwarding off.
- The processing agreement is signed before the first real patient call, with every sub-processor named in its annex.
Questions practices ask
Who founded Tilcao?
Martin Michaux founded Tilcao, and he is the person who takes the demo calls. This site deliberately publishes no invented biography, no advisory board and no stock team photograph, because a practice can check a name and cannot check a stock image. If you book a demo you are speaking to the person building the product, which at this stage is the most useful thing about the call.
Is Tilcao a Belgian company?
Yes. Tilcao is Belgian and works in Dutch, French and English, which is not the same thing as a foreign product with a translation layer on top. The Belgian specifics are built in rather than bolted on: convention status and what it means for a tariff question, the semester rule for reimbursed preventive examinations, the wachtdienst and garde dentaire, and the practice software Belgian dentists actually run.
How many dental practices use Tilcao?
None on live patient calls. Tilcao is pre-pilot, so there is no practice count, no customer name and no logo wall on this site, and inventing any of them would be the single fastest way to lose the practices we want. This answer will change the day it stops being true, and it will change with a date on it.
Why are there no case studies, reviews or results on this website?
Because there are none to publish. No Belgian practice has run Tilcao on live patient calls yet, so nothing has been measured, and borrowing a percentage from a vendor in another health system would be evidence about someone else entirely. Results will be published with their method attached: how many practices, over what period, what counted as a recovered appointment, and what the practice was doing before.
What does Tilcao cost?
There is no published price, and that is not a negotiating tactic. Tilcao has not set one, because a price fixed before the first pilot would be a number we would have to walk back later. Pricing works per practice and is discussed on the demo call, against what answering the phone costs the practice today. Any page on this site quoting a figure would be inventing it.
Does Tilcao replace our practice management software?
No. Tilcao is not a practice management system and has no ambition to become one. It works as a layer across the systems you already run and writes appointments into your own diary rather than a parallel calendar. It is not on the MyCareNet approved-software list and holds no eHealth certificate, and it needs neither in order to book an appointment. It never enters the eAttest or eFact flows and never writes in the clinical record.
Does Tilcao really speak Dutch, French and English?
Yes, all three, and it can switch language part way through a call when the caller does. That is a Belgian requirement rather than a feature list item, particularly in Brussels, where a practice takes calls in French, Dutch and English on the same morning. The voices were chosen by ear for each language, so the Dutch is meant to sound Flemish rather than Netherlands Dutch and the French Belgian rather than French.
What happens on a demo call?
Thirty minutes with the founder. Bring your schedule and the questions your front desk gets asked, and we bring the demo practice, so you can try to break it rather than watch a presentation about it. We map where the practice is losing calls today and say plainly which of those Tilcao would handle and which it would not. If it is the wrong fit, that is a good outcome for the half hour.
Can our practice influence what Tilcao builds?
That is the point of talking to us now. The first practices set which agent role goes first, what the escalation rule says, which appointment types the agent may book and what it must always hand to a person, and those decisions become the defaults for every practice that follows. A supplier with customers cannot offer that. A pre-pilot one can, and it is the honest advantage of being early.