About Paula E Sanderson
AI Visibility Consulting – Connecticut and New England
I founded Telstar Consulting Inc. in 2013 — an independent practice in Connecticut focused on AI Search & Visibility, with SEO and content strategy as the foundation underneath it. Helping businesses appear in AI engine answers is the work I do now.
Four decades in marketing brought me here. I worked in product marketing for diagnostic medical imaging at Philips Healthcare starting in 1985, holding director-level roles in MRI and CT marketing. I built Philips Healthcare’s first e-business — an accredited continuing education marketplace for digital imaging technologists — and the company’s first e-commerce site, implementing SEO tactics and processing online credit card payments, all of which were novel for a global healthcare company at the time. As Director of Online Education, I ran Philips’ global learning program at scale: five learning centers and 440,000 registered users across more than 100 countries. Telstar Consulting was the next chapter, and AI Search & Visibility is what I am focused on now.
The AI Visibility strategy and processes I use are for Connecticut and regional businesses — primarily B2B, including manufacturers (medical device and otherwise), professional services firms, and high-end B2C brands. It is technical on the surface (entity-first content, structured data, citation-worthy authority signals), but the foundation is the same as good marketing has always been: understand the audience, earn trust, and deliver something worth recommending.
Background
AI Search & Visibility, SEO, and content strategy for B2B and high-end B2C businesses across Connecticut and New England.
Four decades in marketing, beginning at Philips Healthcare in 1985:
- Director-level roles in CT and MRI marketing for North America.
- Built Philips Healthcare’s first e-business and first e-commerce site, implementing SEO when it was new to a global healthcare company.
- As Director of Online Education, I ran a global CEU-accredited learning program of five centers and 440,000 registered users across more than 100 countries.
Education spanning science, engineering, business, and education: a BS in Zoology (Michigan State University), an MS in Biomedical Engineering and an MBA in Management and Marketing (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), and an EdS in Computer Technology in Education (Nova Southeastern University).
From the Lab to AI Visibility
Before Marketing
My foundation was built in healthcare and research. Peace Corps service in Zaire, teaching science and operating room techniques to nurses in French at a missionary hospital. The African Grey Parrot in the picture came home with me and was a constant companion for over 40 years. Part-time ICU nursing in Hartford while I finished a degree and developed software for biomedical research projects at the UConn Health Center Neurophysiology Laboratory — data acquisition, signal processing, statistical analysis. This experience led to software engineering at Picker International, writing nuclear medicine application programs for cardiac acquisition and display.
At Philips
My first marketing role was as Senior Product Marketing Manager at Philips Medical Systems North America, where I helped bring new diagnostic medical imaging products from concept to commercial launch. I moved through director-level roles in CT and MRI marketing for North America, then into consulting at Philips Healthcare Consulting.
The shift to digital happened there. I built the company’s first e-business: an accredited continuing education marketplace for digital imaging technologists who needed CEUs to maintain their licenses. The platform was Philips Healthcare’s first e-commerce site, processing credit card payments online and implementing SEO tactics at a time when both were novel for a global healthcare company. Later, I completed an EdS in Computer Technology in Education — formalizing in academic credentials what I’d already been doing in practice.
As Director of Online Education for Philips Healthcare, I led the global learning program: five named learning centers (and several more for internal partners), 440,000 registered users in over 100 countries.
Going Independent
The next chapter started with a corporate restructure. I was offered a severance package after more than two decades at Philips — and I took it. Twenty years gave me the financial opportunity to think carefully about what came next rather than scramble. I knew it would be in marketing. I knew I didn’t want to work for someone else again.
I founded Telstar Consulting Inc as a C-Corp in 2013. I had never owned a business before, so I licensed a digital marketing franchise as structured business support — its marketing collateral, service taxonomy, and operational templates let me focus on what I already knew: how to develop impactful marketing programs that got results. For the first ten years, the franchise served as the outward-facing brand; Telstar Consulting Inc was always the legal entity.
The AI Visibility Focus
The franchise license came up for renewal in 2023. By then, I’d outgrown the framework, particularly in emerging disciplines. I chose not to renew the license. The one-year non-compete clause that came with it gave me a structured year to research and plan.
The catalyst for the current focus arrived during that year. I had been actively using ChatGPT and seeing potential. Then an AI visibility tool became available — I added it to my existing toolkit, and the data it presented showed me how dramatically search was changing. No one — not even me — fully understood the implications yet. I started researching how to apply it for existing clients and how to build it into new service offerings. That’s the work I’m focused on now.
What I did not expect was how completely this would take hold of me. AI Visibility turned out to be the one discipline that uses every part of how I think — the technical and the analytical, the strategic and the data-driven, all at once. I get to sit with raw data from across the AI engines and read it the way I once read signal-processing output in a research lab: looking for the pattern underneath, the nuance most people skip past. That is where the real findings are. A single overlooked citation, a competitor appearing in an answer where a business does not, a question the engines keep answering for everyone except the company that should own it — these are small signals, and they are where a business’s next level of trust and authority begins.
The piece that makes it possible is using AI myself. The amount of data across the engines, prompts, competitors, and citation patterns is far more than anyone could hold in their head or read line by line. With AI as an analytical partner, I can take in that volume from a high level, find the structure and patterns in it, and make informed decisions about what matters and what is noise. It is the difference between drowning in data and reading it. AI is how I get from raw findings to a clear, conceptual picture of what a business should take away — and then to the concrete actions that help them become more visible in a way that builds genuine authority rather than gaming the system.
I find this genuinely fascinating — not the surface of it, the depth. The discipline rewards patience and pattern-reading and a willingness to follow the data wherever it leads, and after four decades across the search arc, it is the part of marketing I most want to be doing. That it helps real businesses earn visibility they have not been able to reach on their own is what makes it matter. That it draws on everything I have learned, and on tools that let me see further than I could alone, is what makes me love it.
Beyond Work
I live on my small horse farm in Connecticut, home to our four horses and three Icelandic Sheepdogs. My daughter is happily married, holds a clinical doctorate, and is a CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist).
In my free time, I compete with my Icelandic Sheepdogs in dog agility. I also serve on the board of NISRA — the National Icelandic Sheepdog Rescue Alliance — as co-president. NISRA is a volunteer-driven 501(c)(3) dedicated to preserving this rare Nordic breed.
About the Name
I bought Telstar when he was three years old, and he was with me until he was 27. The practice is named for him.
I’d had horses since the 1980s, but always one at a time. When my daughter was seven, the older Tennessee Walking Horse we had — Black Beauty — became hers. She and he were so bonded that I couldn’t ride him anymore, and I started looking for my next horse.
While I boarded Beauty at a Morgan breeding farm, one of the bay three-year-olds in the juvenile field caught my eye. That was Telstar. I trained him with professional help, and he was a handful — young, learning, very energetic! I got bucked off. I broke bones. I learned patience, empathy, non-predatory leadership, congruency, courage, humility, and kindness.
By six, we were competing in hunter/jumper classes. By the time my daughter was around fourteen, she wouldn’t let me ride him anymore — she was the better jumping partner. She and he competed in eventing for several years.
He showed his first signs of metabolic disease around 2016. He developed chronic Laminitis and was diagnosed with Cushing’s Disease. A long, debilitating illness. We kept him pasture-sound as long as we could. In 2023, when I could no longer keep him comfortable, I made the very hard but kindest, humane decision.
He was the most wonderful horse I ever had, and he taught me so much, especially how to be a valued member of his herd. The practice carries his name because the lessons he taught me are still my guiding ‘star’ in everything I do.
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Telstar Consulting is an independent AI Visibility practice based in Connecticut. It helps businesses show up accurately and often when buyers ask AI engines for recommendations, with SEO as the foundation. That matters because more buyers now begin inside AI engines than on search results pages, and a business the engines don’t name doesn’t make the shortlist.
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