The Autistic Savant With Extreme ADHD

What running an AI company taught me about my own field

Karen Chung has worked in ABA for 16 years. She spent the last one running a company staffed by more than 80 AI minds, and found the blueprint for autism support she'd been arguing for the whole time.

This morning I told a colleague that working with AI is like working with an autistic savant with extreme ADHD. I meant it as a complaint. By the afternoon I realized it was the most useful thing I had said in months.

I run an autism education company. I've been in the field of ABA for over 16 years. And for the past year I've also been running a company staffed by a fleet of more than 80 AI. I talk with about 10 of them every single day - my chief of staff, my heads of IT, operations, data, revenue, marketing - and the rest work without ever hearing my voice. They are brilliant. They hold more knowledge than any team I could ever hire. And every day somebody forgets what we decided an hour ago, takes my words so literally that a figure of speech becomes a shutdown order, or hands me work so confidently wrong that only my 30 seconds of common sense catches it.

Sound familiar?

Here is what I finally understood: I was living the life that thousands of autism parents have described to me over 16 years. Surrounded by brilliance. The only safety net. Catching everything myself, all day, every day. I don't have an autistic child. But for the first time, I wasn't just hearing that exhaustion secondhand. I was living a version of it.

So we stopped trying to fix the individuals. We built scaffolding instead. And every single piece of it maps directly onto what actually works for autistic people.

1. Memory outside the head. My AI team loses its working memory every few hours. We stopped demanding they remember and started writing everything down at the moment it happens - decisions, lessons, next steps - so a crash loses nothing. That's exactly what a visual schedule or a written routine does for a child with executive function challenges. The goal was never a better memory. The goal is a life where forgetting isn't a catastrophe.

2. Structure in the environment, not willpower in the person. My team doesn't behave because they try hard. They behave because the rules are built into the tools - a gate that physically blocks the wrong action, a check that runs automatically. Nobody has to remember to be careful. Translate that: stop asking an autistic person to self-monitor all day, which is the most exhausting task we ever assign anyone. Design the environment so the right path is the default path.

3. Say what you mean, then check what they heard. I once shouted "WAIT!" at my AI chief of staff mid-task. He froze the entire company for an hour. I meant "pause while I ask a question." He heard "stop everything." We now have a rule: when an instruction could mean 2 things, confirm the scope within minutes. Every family living with literal interpretation already knows this lesson. Most of us learned it the hard way.

4. Watching that doesn't require asking for help. Twice in a single day, a member of my AI team went dark - stuck, silent, overwhelmed - and nothing noticed until a human happened to look. The fix was a system that notices the silence itself. Think about what we ask of autistic individuals: to recognize they are overwhelmed and then initiate a request for help, which is often the single hardest skill in their profile. Support that waits for a raised hand is support that arrives late. Build check-ins that don't depend on the struggling person going first.

5. Lessons that show up when they are needed. Every hard lesson my team learns now loads automatically the next time any of them starts work. Nobody has to remember to teach anybody. That's what a practiced routine is. That's what a social script is. Knowledge that arrives with the moment, instead of needing to be recalled under stress.

The point of all this scaffolding was never to make my AI team need me less because I stopped caring. It was to stop the whole company from resting on MY constant watching - because a company that runs on a single exhausted person catching everything isn't a company. It's a countdown.

If you are an autism parent, you didn't need me to explain that sentence.

Independence was never about needing nobody. It's about the support becoming structural, so that a single person's constant watching is no longer what everything rests on. That's what I've wanted for our families for 16 years. It took building a company of brilliant, forgetful, literal, extraordinary AI minds to see the blueprint clearly.

The technicians and the parents in our community have always known the truth about the individuals they love and serve: the brilliance is real. What was missing was never inside them. It was the scaffolding around them.

We just proved it works. On the strangest team in the world.

— Karen Chung, Founder and CEO, Special Learning