Sixteen years of
one idea.

Karen Chung is the Founder and CEO of SL Global. She arrived in Chicago from South Korea in 1975, aged nine, with her family and $500. While her parents worked several jobs, she raised her three younger siblings, delivered newspapers at 4 a.m. and worked through high school, putting every paycheck toward the family.

She began as a CPA at a boutique firm, then worked in internal and external accounting, financial analysis and business analysis at middle-market and Fortune 1000 companies, including Helene Curtis, ServiceMaster and IBM. She spent five years in boutique investment banking, handling M&A and fundraising for small and mid-sized organizations. A consultant for almost all her career, she has coached CEOs at 30 fast-growth entrepreneurial and enterprise organizations with revenues from $10 million to nearly $1 billion, including TransUnion.

Her 26 years as an entrepreneur began with retained executive search at Nomadic Consulting in the late 1990s. She went on to found Troupe Salon, Spa Mondial, Special Learning and ABA Business Growth Solutions. Her management principle is that organizational leverage comes from replicating judgment, not adding headcount.

She founded Special Learning in 2010 to address the shortage of trained professionals that left more than 95% of autistic people worldwide without access to applied behavior analysis. Her goal is to change the lives of one billion people. Special Learning has served 32,000+ customers in over 140 countries and produced more than 500 original training products across ABA roles and credentials. It is a BACB Authorized Continuing Education Provider (OP-14-2437).

She has worked with data and lists for 26 years. Sixteen years in the field have developed her working knowledge of applied behavior analysis (ABA) and organizational behavior management (OBM). These disciplines shaped her reliance on objective, actionable data for every decision. SL Global applies ABA and OBM throughout its work, including how it builds, measures and manages its AI team.

Karen spent more than 3,000 hours studying AI before building with it. Before reliable agents existed, she worked across the major models, having one draft, another critique and a third cross-check, sometimes for 50 rounds on one section. She was coordinating an AI team by hand. That work established a rule she still follows: models checking models is necessary, but a human must make the final decision.

She began using agentic AI in 2025 and connected it to the business on January 29, 2026, the first night. During 2026, SL Global moved from one AI lab's harness to its own LLM-agnostic system. She is now working to automate 100% of her organization with more than 10 LLM families, each assigned specific roles alongside her human staff. She treats AI as collaborators: each partner has a name, a defined role and accountability for its work. AI carries the volume across education, recruiting, provider data and investigations. Answers point to their sources, and people make the decisions.

The businesses she has built around Special Learning serve different parts of the field:

• ESBAP, the Ethics Standards Board of ABA Providers: the first ownership-transparency database in ABA, making provider ownership and accountability searchable across 15,000+ locations in 48 states.
• ABA Business Growth: ethical retained executive search and operating advisory for ABA agencies.
• ProfCEUs: continuing education for speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists and allied health professionals.
• AutismFLIX: expert-led autism and ABA training video for parents and professionals.
• SL Global's investigations and disputes practice: reconciling large, difficult records for counsel, with every figure traced to its source.