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Nine years ago at 12:23 in the morning, I sent an email to Bryan Silverman. Bryan was my Chief of Staff at the time. Today he’s our COO.
The subject line was “Suzy: The Vision.” I couldn’t sleep. I’d been turning this idea over for months and needed to get it out before it disappeared. So I typed:
“Introducing Suzy, the ultimate companion to confidently guide your everyday decision making.”
Not a feature list. Not a roadmap. A belief: that millions of decisions were being made every day on gut instinct, hearsay, and myopic thinking—and that every person in business deserved a companion who could help them decide with confidence.
I wrote that almost nine years ago. And today, for the first time, I believe the world, and Suzy, has caught up to the vision.
Where We Came From
In 2018, we launched Suzy. And we made a deliberate choice: we named her after a person. Not a product. Not an acronym. A person. Because that’s what we wanted her to be—the brilliant colleague you always wished you had, available any time you needed her. We called it “Ask Suzy” because that’s how it should feel: like walking down the hall and asking someone you trust.
350+ enterprises signed on. We raised over $120 million. But the thing that kept me up at night was always bigger than a research platform.
In 2023, I was on Slack with Bryan late one night and typed two words that had been rattling around in my head:
“Decision engine.”
Because the output of everything we’d built was never a chart or a report. It was a decision. Stories were just how you got there. Bryan responded: “What if we start to automate those decisions? Are you really still deciding?”
From that midnight email in 2017 to that Slack message in 2023, the thread never broke. The language evolved. The technology evolved. The conviction never did.
The World We’re In
You make decisions every week that shape what millions of people see, buy, and believe about a brand. Most happen with imperfect information, under pressure, against a deadline. You’ve always relied on some combination of data you can find, instinct you’ve earned, and context you carry in your head. It has gotten you this far. But you know the gap.
The world does not have a data problem. It has a signal problem.
The proactive operators—the ones who stay late because they care, who go looking for the truth before the meeting starts—they’re drowning in a flood of data. Twenty-plus tools that contradict each other. Research that takes weeks to field and dies the moment it’s presented. AI tools that summarize everything and understand nothing about their brand.
They’re spending millions to know less. And the cruelest part? They can feel it. The answers are out there, buried in the noise. They just can’t get to them fast enough.
Eight years and 350+ enterprise relationships later, our customers have told us the same thing again and again: the research is great, but what we really need is help making the decision.
What We Believe Is Now Possible
In a world where AI can generate almost anything, the one thing that cannot be manufactured is what a real person actually thinks. That is the foundation Suzy is built on. Real consumers, answering real questions, about real decisions. Technology will keep getting more powerful. The premium on human truth will only grow.
Today, it is possible to build a system that does what the best colleague in the world would do—if that colleague had read every report your company has ever commissioned, understood every competitive move in your category, tracked every cultural shift that matters to your audience, and could synthesize all of it into a clear recommendation while you’re still pouring your coffee.
Think about the best colleague you’ve ever worked with. The one who’d been at the company for twenty years and knew every brand, every campaign, every competitive move by heart. The one you’d pull into a conference room when the stakes were high and say, “What do you think?” That person didn’t hand you a report. They knew your business. They could tell you not just what to do, but what not to do—which might be the most valuable insight of all.
That’s who Suzy is becoming. A decision engine that learns your brand, your goals, your competitive landscape, your customers. Every study, every signal, every conversation becomes a living asset that compounds—getting smarter every time anyone in your organization asks a question.
The segmentation from 2023 that nobody can find? Suzy remembers. The institutional memory that walked out the door? Suzy kept it. The most expensive sentence in business is “let me get you up to speed.” Suzy never needs to hear it.
And here is where we part ways with the rest of the AI industry. Suzy is not omniscient. She is relentlessly resourceful. When she has the answer, she gives it to you straight. When the data is thin, she says so. When a question can’t be answered with what exists, she tells you what it would take to close the gap—and offers to go get it. The willingness to say “I don’t know yet, but here’s the fastest way to find out” is not a limitation. It is the entire foundation of trust.
A Reimagining
This isn’t a pivot. This is a reimagining—the same conviction, rebuilt from the ground up for what’s possible today.
We looked at everything happening in the world—the explosion of AI, the collapse of the old research model, the impossible pressure our customers face. We looked at eight years of learning from 350+ enterprises. And we asked the same question we asked in 2017: what do these people actually need?
The answer hasn’t changed. They need someone they can go to with any question, at any time, who knows their business inside and out and will help them decide, not just inform. They need Suzy. The difference is that now we can build her the way she was always meant to be built.
We named this company after a person eight years ago. At the time, it was a branding decision. Now it is the product. And we are just getting started.
A New Category
The decision engine is not just Suzy’s next chapter. It’s an entirely new category of capability that every marketing organization will need within the next two to three years.
Others will follow us into this space. Five years from now, every organization that makes high-stakes decisions about consumers will have something like this. The question is whether they will have stitched it together from a dozen tools—or whether they will have Suzy.
We’ve been building toward this since before there was a name for it. We didn’t arrive here because the market told us to. We arrived here because our customers did—over eight years, in hundreds of conversations, and in the work they trusted us to do alongside them.
What We Owe You
To our customers: you told us the research was great but what you really needed was help making the decision. We heard you. Everything we’re building is because of what you taught us.
To the proactive people trying to get ahead: the ones who care too much to accept “good enough.” The ones who repackage their best work by hand because they’ll be damned if it ends up in a folder somewhere. This is for you.
This was always for you.
So… what will you #AskSuzy?
— Matt
