Susan Sly

The founder who put a camera in the aisle and a strategy in the boardroom

In 2022, a small computer vision company called RadiusAI walked into VentureBeat's AI Innovator at The Edge category and walked out with the award. The other finalists were Boston Dynamics and the AI team at Ford. The company co-led by Susan Sly was the one that took it home. That is the kind of sentence that tells you most of what you need to know about how she operates: pick the room with the giants in it, then win it.

Sly is the Founder and CEO of The Pause Technologies, an AI platform headquartered in Phoenix. Before that she was Co-CEO and co-founder of RadiusAI, where the technology was built to watch a retail environment in real time and make sense of it as it happened. She did not just sit in the strategy chair. She led a deployment of that computer vision system across fifteen US states, which is the part of AI nobody tweets about: getting a model out of the lab and into a thousand messy real-world locations where the lighting is bad and the people do not behave like the training data.

That distinction matters to her. Plenty of people can talk about artificial intelligence. Fewer can ship it. Sly built her second act around real-time AI specifically, the kind that has to make a decision now, at the edge, where the data is being created, rather than days later in a comfortable cloud. It is harder, less forgiving, and exactly where she chose to plant her flag.

Two degrees from the same institute

She is a two-time graduate of MIT executive programs, one from MIT Sloan and one from MIT's School of Engineering, where she concentrated on artificial intelligence and innovation. She holds certificates in Management and Leadership, Technology and Operations, and Strategy and Innovation. It is an unusual pairing, the business school and the engineering school, and it shows up in how she speaks: fluent enough in the technical layer to be credible to engineers, plain enough in the business layer to be useful to a board.

That bilingualism is why the hardware and chip world keeps handing her a microphone. She has presented for NVIDIA, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo, and turned up at CES and at the World Economic Forum's gatherings in Davos. When a company that makes the silicon AI runs on wants someone to explain why any of it matters to a customer, they call the founder who has actually deployed the thing.

Before the algorithms, the arithmetic

Long before the AI chapter, Sly learned the unglamorous craft of selling. She built channel sales teams that produced more than $2 billion in cumulative sales. That number is not a vanity metric. It is the reason she understands distribution, incentives, and human behavior at scale, which turns out to be the same problem set as deploying a model: you can have the best product in the world and still fail if you cannot get people to adopt it.

She is also a working writer. Sly is the author of seven books, including Have It All Woman and Organize Your Life. One project, co-authored with Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield, landed on six Amazon bestseller lists. Canfield's own verdict on her: "Susan Sly is an inspiration to women, from overall health, to finance, to relationships."

The microphone she points at other people

For all the stages she stands on, one of her most durable projects is the one where she hands the spotlight to someone else. Sly hosts Raw and Real Entrepreneurship, a podcast that has been downloaded in more than 160 countries and has run for hundreds of episodes. The premise is in the title. No highlight reels, no varnish, just long conversations with founders about what building actually costs. It is the rare founder podcast that interviews other founders instead of relitigating the host's own greatest hits.

The recognition has followed the work. She was voted one of the top female entrepreneurs in AI in 2023, named by RT Insights among the top nineteen women in AI to watch in 2024, and listed by CTO Magazine among women leading the AI revolution. She has appeared on CNN, CNBC, Fox, and Lifetime, and been quoted in Forbes, MarketWatch, and Yahoo Finance.

What she is building now

The Pause Technologies is the current obsession. It is an AI platform built for women, designed and developed alongside clinicians, with a companion app called Harmoni at its center. She co-founded it with Dr. Mia Chorney, and assembled a board of medical advisors and a development team to build it properly rather than fast. The mission, in the company's own words, is to deliver personalized, evidence-based, AI-driven products that are actually accessible. The product is also, characteristically, real-time: insights when you need them, not a report you read later.

There is a through-line across everything Sly has built. The sales teams, the computer vision rollout, the podcast, the new platform. Each one is about taking something complicated and making it land with an actual human being. She tends to summarize her philosophy of the AI era in one line that doubles as a warning to the whole industry: "Staying human through the change isn't a weakness. It may be the whole advantage."

For a person who spends her days deep inside machine learning, that is a strikingly analog thesis. It is also, so far, a winning one.

The edge is where it gets hard

It is worth lingering on the phrase that keeps attaching itself to her: real-time AI at the edge. Most of the AI conversation happens in a comfortable place, where models get fed clean data and have all the time in the world to answer. The edge is the opposite. It is a camera in a store that has to interpret what it sees as it sees it, on hardware that is small, with a network connection that may or may not cooperate. RadiusAI's award was specifically for innovation at that edge, which is why the company beating two giants of robotics and automotive AI was not a fluke. It was the whole point. Sly chose the difficult corner of the field on purpose, because that is where the real problems live and where the easy demos fall apart.

Leading a deployment across fifteen states is the proof of that choice. Anyone can run a pilot. A pilot is a model behaving on its best day in one location with engineers hovering nearby. Fifteen states is a different animal entirely: different stores, different cameras, different customers, different failure modes, all at once, with no one to hold the system's hand. That is the work that separates an AI demo from an AI business, and it is the work she chose to own.

A second institution: the podcast

If MIT gave her the credentials, Raw and Real Entrepreneurship gave her something harder to buy: range. Hosting hundreds of episodes with founders means she has interviewed people through funding rounds and failures, through scaling and stalling, and the accumulated pattern recognition is its own kind of education. The show has been downloaded in more than 160 countries, which is to say her audience is not a niche American business crowd but a global one. There is a reason the title leads with "raw." Sly's interest is in the unedited version of building a company, the part that does not make the keynote slides, and that appetite for candor is the same instinct that drives her own companies.

The endorsements she has collected speak to the same quality. Marian Edwards of HPE described her as "an empowering and authentic speaker at the bleeding edge of AI." Authentic is a word that gets thrown around loosely, but in her case it has a specific meaning: she will tell a boardroom the parts of AI that are hard, expensive, and unglamorous, because she has lived all three.

Building The Pause the slow way

The Pause Technologies could have been built fast and shipped loud. Instead, Sly built it deliberately. She co-founded it with Dr. Mia Chorney, who brings three decades of healthcare experience, and surrounded the product with a board of medical advisors that includes more than a dozen specialists. The development team is a full bench of engineers, designers and specialists rather than a skeleton crew chasing a launch date. The company's flagship, the Harmoni app, was built collaboratively with clinicians and the women it is meant to serve. That is a slower way to build, and a more expensive one, and it tells you what she values: getting it right over getting it first.

It also completes a pattern that runs across her whole career. The sales teams taught her distribution. RadiusAI taught her how to ship AI into the messy real world. The podcast taught her what founders actually struggle with. The Pause is where all three converge, a company that has to deploy real-time AI, reach people at scale, and stay genuinely useful to the human on the other end of the screen. She has, in effect, spent twenty years assembling exactly the toolkit this company requires.

Ask what makes her unusual and the answer is not any single credential. It is the combination. Plenty of operators can sell. Plenty of engineers can build. Plenty of speakers can fill a stage at CES or Davos. The rare thing is one person who has done all of it and can move between those worlds in a single conversation, translating the engineering for the boardroom and the boardroom back to the engineers. That is the role she has carved out, and the recognition keeps arriving on schedule because the work keeps backing it up.