Leo Toronto officially announced the launch of Hi LEO, an AI agent for every Leo employee. It pulls from the world’s leading edge AI tools, to give all employees the ability to prompt Hi LEO for support with anything they may need in their workday.
“AI has tremendous potential to reshape our industry—and unlock huge creative power and commercial value for our client partners and our own business,” said Ben Tarr, President of Leo Group Canada. “We created Hi LEO not as a shortcut, but as an amplifier to our teams. Our people are at the heart of our agency and this tool is designed to help them think bigger, move with agility and spend more time on the work that makes the biggest difference to our clients.”
As the advertising industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, agencies are under growing pressure to deliver breakthrough ideas at speed, while maintaining a high level of craft and strategic rigor.
“Agencies have been struggling with time constraints for as long as I’ve been in advertising”, says Angus Tucker, CCO at Leo Toronto. “Hi LEO can take a lot of the slog out of the creative process – formatting, sourcing materials and video reference, combing through research – and give our people more time to actually think about ideas.”
Adam Pickard, Leo Toronto’s Creative Director, Innovation (who was hired in February of 2025) has been instrumental in making AI part and parcel of how the agency operates. “Adam sits in the creative department, working around the teams every day, so he’s bringing that ‘maker’ mindset into the agency on the daily,’ says Tucker. ‘Ideas that were once sketches on the wall can now be turned into real things where you can assess what kind of potential they have way quicker than before.’
Hi LEO was designed specifically around the day-to-day realities of the business. The platform aggregates multiple generative AI models and services into one secure environment, with modules tailored to each discipline. Since piloting the platform earlier this year, Leo Toronto teams have already reported measurable improvements in workflow efficiency and creative output.
“Hi LEO gives us a starting point that accelerates the entire process of consumer research,” said Tahir Ahmad, Chief Strategy Officer at Leo Toronto. “It doesn’t do the work for us—it just helps us get to the exciting part of the work faster. The ideas which unfold are still ours, but now we have more bandwidth to push them further.”
While Leo is still in its MVP phase, future releases slated for January will include synthetic audiences that match critical growth cohorts and audiences, which will allow teams to co-create work with them, unearth rich insights and use the audiences for in the moment feedback during ideation. And there’s something nice about bringing Leo back as a member of the team working alongside every member of the agency.