Shamil Radia

It started with BlackBerry

My career started with mobile communications and helping people understand that mobile communications can make them more efficient. Right? Now it almost seems logical to think that way — but in those days a multi-million-dollar business owner would say, "Why do I need a cell phone? People can just call me."

That was the original question I used to answer. Then it became, "Why do I need a cell phone that also sends me my emails and texts?" RIM was a leader in Canada and the world when it came to secure peer-to-peer communications. We'd walk into local small, medium, and large businesses, smash a BlackBerry on the floor, put it back together and say — look, you can keep working. The intent was to learn how to bring hardware, software, and people together.

One of my best clients was Watchfire — a cybersecurity startup. I'd helped them grow their mobile communications over their first three years. One day in their boardroom, the director of sales asked if I wanted to start selling cybersecurity instead of phones. That's how I crossed over.

Then came 14 years at IBM

Watchfire was acquired by IBM about two years after I joined. Suddenly I was inside one of the largest cybersecurity divisions on the planet. Enterprise Cybersecurity Specialist and Client Executive working across Z series, software, GBS, and Watson X. My toolset included AppScan, MaaS360, Guardium, the Q1 Labs SIEM stack — the full seven layers of security. I helped secure some of the largest Fortune 100 healthcare orgs: BCBS, CHS, the Heartland-tier organizations that sit on hundreds of millions of patient records.

I sat in boardrooms trying to bridge the gap between people, process, and technology. Once we showed a major grocery chain twenty SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities sitting in production. They fired the developer on the spot. That moment taught me something I never forgot: empathy. It wasn't always the developer's fault. They didn't have the tools. We had to bring people with us, not over them.

In the latter days at IBM, I built a product I called Intelligent OI. Everyone was cold-calling the same C-levels. I built a tailored LinkedIn outreach system: "I just want to meet you so we can share education together."

Over 70% LinkedIn connection rate. 10 to 12 booked appointments per rep per week — up from two. The formula: Lead with education. Qualify with education. Capture a booked time using a funnel while you have the attention. That formula is the genetic code of every funnel I've built since.

Why dental

About 12 years ago, IBM let me run the system as a pet project inside dentistry. Three reasons it fit:

1. Dentists manage multi-million-dollar budgets — and they make their own decisions. No procurement layer. No six-month enterprise sales cycle.

2. Dental is the one slice of healthcare governments still don't fully cover. That makes it profit-driven by design. Real money, real ROI, real urgency.

3. The product was clinically world-class and commercially invisible. Brilliant clinicians with broken patient acquisition. The biggest gap I'd seen in any industry I'd touched.

I spun out of IBM to build what became the original dental patient lead-gen platform. Dentiza. That's what I've spent the last twelve years obsessed with.

And we failed miserably for three years

The product worked. The leads came in. But the practices weren't ready. Staff was reactive, not proactive. Front offices weren't running a sales pipeline like an IBM team would. We had cracked acquisition without fixing operations — and it cost us a high-churn product for years.

Marketing without operations is theatre. Operations without marketing is a hobby. I learned that the hard way, by watching it nearly take the company down.

The dentist & the denturist in the same place

Six years ago I worked with a high-value new practice that had just built a new building from the ground up. I watched a denturist run an all-on-four conversation and realized: the denturist controls the all-on-four market.

We re-architected the entire engagement around that insight. That led to "the queen of all-on-fours" closing four cases in 90 days, and eventually serving 160-plus practices including Markham Vitality and Renew Implants.

And then AI broke everything open

I'm not new to AI. I worked on the Watson X team at IBM. The technology isn't the surprise — what changed in 2026 is patient behavior.

67% of patient research journeys now start with an AI summary. 14% of patients trust AI to give a diagnosis. 58% trust AI to pick their specialist. That second number is where case acceptance now lives or dies.

So we rebuilt the model. Two-hundred-and-ninety-five-page persuasive websites. Multilingual semantic structure — Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, French — because patients search in their first language. Topic-map authority graphs. Dictation-to-content pipelines that feed ChatGPT credibility signals daily. Intent-based video frameworks that show up inside AI summaries, not next to them.

That's the work. That's the obsession. If you came here looking for a marketer who'll get you a few more cleanings, I'm the wrong guy. If you've spent ten years building real clinical skill and you're tired of being commercially invisible — we should probably talk.

What I believe

Off the clock

I live in Ottawa with my family. I've been a Kansas City Chiefs fan since before Mahomes was born. I'll watch a Sens playoff run with the same intensity I'll watch a client launch.

My father was a lawyer — which is why I'll always look at both sides of an angle before I land on one. I write my own LinkedIn posts, my own keynotes, my own newsletter. AI helps me build dental ecosystems for clients; it doesn't write the personal stuff. That's just shit from the heart.

And — full disclosure on why I care about this work specifically — I had my first dental implant placed at seventeen. Soccer accident. Own teammate came up for the same header. So when I tell a clinician this work matters, I mean it from the chair, not just the boardroom.