Simon Fogel is a leadership, human-centered AI adoption advisor based in East Gwillimbury, Ontario,
and the founder and principal of Tove Consulting. He helps executive teams turn AI investment into
adoption that actually changes how work gets done — moving past paid-for licenses and stalled pilots to
measurable, trusted, repeatable change in how their people work. His premise is that AI adoption is not
primarily a technology problem; it is a people, change, and leadership problem, and therefore a
leadership responsibility. His work is grounded in an established leadership-adoption methodology that
he is being trained and certified in and brings to clients as HAIL — twelve domains across four pillars.
Two situations tend to bring clients to him. The first is a rollout that has stalled: the tool is deployed, the
licenses are paid for, and usage sits at a fraction of what was projected, with no clear account of why.
The second is a program not yet scaled: a pilot worked, or leadership has committed to a broader push,
and they want to know what will get in the way before spending at scale, while course correction is still
inexpensive. His diagnosis is consistent — AI programs get resourced as technology projects and stall as
change projects. Employees are uncertain whether their role survives, leaders haven’t said clearly what
is changing because they don’t yet have the answers, and capable tools get deployed into that silence
and quietly go unused.
Through assessments and working sessions, Simon advises leaders on the human side of that problem
rather than doing the work for them. He helps leaders build the readiness and trust that let people
move forward with confidence; work through how their own role, decisions, and sense of what
leadership is for must change as AI reshapes the organization; communicate the shift in a way that aligns
their people and reshapes culture; and put in place the responsible, measurable practices — around risk,
governance, and reinforcement — that make adoption hold. The execution stays with their teams. His
role is to help leadership see clearly, decide well, and lead the change so that capable tools are actually
taken up and trusted.
His work draws on a long track record of enterprise delivery and change management, concentrated in
financial services on both sides of the border, where he has led delivery and adoption across well over
$100 million in client technology spend. Through Tove, his engagements span Canada’s major banks —
Scotiabank, TD, RBC, and CIBC — along with US financial-services work. Recently, he led change
management and quality assurance at Scotiabank (2023–2025) for two industry-wide regulatory
transitions — the T+1 settlement-date change and a street-wide trading-system upgrade — each
demanding alignment across stakeholders who did not report to him, against deadlines the bank did not
control. At TD, he led technology initiatives across Global Operations, Client Services, and Asset
Management, including a US back-office wealth-management redesign spanning two regulatory
regimes. In an earlier engagement at Scotiabank, he delivered a $7.5 million global confirmations-
platform consolidation that integrated natural language processing and big data into a regulated
environment — an early instance of the AI-and-change problem he now specializes in.
Simon holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of
Toronto and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and Certified ScrumMaster.