Eight days into a new chief executive’s tenure, one might reasonably expect a functioning calendar, a brave relationship with the expense system and perhaps a name remembered without help from the org chart. Grant Toups went to Davos. There, in the snow and ceremony of the World Economic Forum, Hotwire’s new global CEO helped launch research on “agentic organizations” - companies in which people and AI systems share more of the work, decisions and consequences. It was a brisk beginning in every sense. Toups, a Californian by residence and a Louisianan by birth, later thanked a colleague for the intelligence that mattered most urgently: lined boots and winter underwear.
The trip made an efficient prologue to the job. Hotwire is a 25-year-old technology communications agency, joined with marketing-services business ROI·DNA and spread across a dozen countries. Toups arrived in January 2026 with a remit to give that history a future. His subject was artificial intelligence, but his real concern was organization: who decides, who remains accountable and what becomes of human craft when machines can produce competent work before lunch.
A résumé made of building sites
Toups’s career makes more sense as a series of construction projects than as a ladder. He joined the boutique consultancy PulsePoint Group as its first employee. He built its Organizational Optimization and Transformation practice, then took responsibility for operations and eventually became managing partner and president. The progression matters. It began not with a large inherited machine but with the question that has followed him since: how should a group of people be arranged to do better work?
PulsePoint became part of a much larger answer. At ICF Next, Toups helped conceptualize and launch an integrated agency assembled from nearly a dozen businesses. The new operation brought 1,700 creatives, communicators, strategists and technologists under one name in 2019. He led substantial pieces of it - technology, stakeholder experience, customer loyalty, strategy and transformation - and served as chief client officer. Integration is a bloodless word for a distinctly human task. Logos can be combined before lunch. Habits, loyalties and rival spreadsheets are less obedient.
One career, four versions of the same operating question
In late 2021, Hill & Knowlton appointed him its first global chief technology officer. It was a title that said as much about the industry as the person. Communications firms had long bought software; now one was giving technology a seat on its global leadership council. Toups built centers of excellence across seven cities and advanced tools for risk prediction, reputation measurement and performance insight. In 2023, the firm described an Intelligence + Technology group of more than 50 data and technology leaders.
When Hill & Knowlton and BCW combined to form Burson in 2024, Toups became global chief digital and intelligence officer. His network covered social and digital media, paid and performance media, and data and intelligence professionals in more than 40 countries. The brief included monitoring, crisis preparedness, predictive capability and the awkwardly important business of attaching financial meaning to reputation. The Fount, Burson’s AI-powered intelligence and measurement platform, received the 2024 AMEC Grand Prix for best use of new technology in communications measurement.
The CEO who asks to see the work
Toups did not arrive at Hotwire and immediately order a ceremonial transformation. His first move was closer to an audit conducted by conversation. He met the leaders of the agency’s country businesses, then spent his first afternoon with major clients. Soon he was looking at the work, the go-to-market machinery and what he calls “pitch craft.” He has described himself as having a “voracious” appetite for detail. This is the sort of admission that can make a PowerPoint nervous.
The instinct is partly technical and partly social. Toups has been active in the Arthur W. Page Society’s orbit since 2013, as a founding PageUp member and later a member of its operating committee. He convenes a Future Leaders Experience session on the technological future of communications. Years earlier, when two USC Annenberg students shadowed him at PulsePoint, one asked how to choose an area of public relations. His advice was not to chase the grandest specialty. Think about the work environment and industries that fit your personality, he told her. The student said the question made her future easier to picture.
“People don’t change their behavior because you tell them to; they change their behavior because you inspire them.”Grant Toups, at a Page Society seminar
It is a revealing piece of counsel from an executive associated with systems, data and measurement. Toups earned a bachelor’s degree at Tulane in finance and business law, then a master’s in strategic public relations at USC. One education supplies the ratios; the other asks what people will believe. His career has occupied the corridor between them.
Big enough to build, small enough to move
Toups’s thesis for Hotwire begins with scale. He argues that communications is entering a “golden age” for midsize agencies. The giant networks have reach and resources but can move heavily. Small specialists have speed but may lack the capital, geographic coverage or technical bench for a sprawling global assignment. Hotwire, in his telling, can live in the useful middle: large enough to deliver across markets and build its own technology, small enough to answer a new client need while it is still new.
The in-house part is important. Hotwire has developers and an AI Labs function, rather than merely placing its label on somebody else’s tool. Its Spark and Ignite products are intended to help brands understand how they appear in AI-generated answers and to connect communications activity with performance. ROI·DNA brings a marketing-services engine alongside Hotwire’s earned-media practice. Toups sees the pieces as a challenger’s kit: reputation, demand, data and software without the lumbering gait of a conglomerate.
Global reach + proprietary technology + earned-media craft + midsize speed.
There is commercial logic behind the timing. Search engines once delivered a list of links. AI systems increasingly deliver a composed answer, deciding which people and organizations look authoritative enough to cite along the way. Toups has put the problem plainly: an executive’s online profile is not merely read; it is processed. Earned media therefore acquires a second audience. A credible article informs a person, and it may also become evidence for a machine.
This helps explain why he expects earned media to become more important rather than less. When synthetic material is cheap and plentiful, independent reporting, recognizable expertise and a traceable reputation become rarer signals. The agency’s work is no longer only to make a client visible. It is to make the client legible to systems that summarize the world before a human arrives.
The limit of the measurable
For someone who has spent a decade making communications more measurable, Toups is notably wary of mistaking a measurement for a mind. After attending the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens in May, he wrote that “agentic” AI is fundamentally an organizational conversation. Autonomous systems alter decision rights, accountability and the shape of a team. Dropping them into an old hierarchy and calling it transformation is wishful thinking in business casual.
“Making something measurable doesn’t automate the judgment. It raises the stakes of getting it right.”Grant Toups, “What Athens Taught Me About Agency”
His harder question concerns apprenticeship. If agents absorb too much junior work, do organizations remove the training ground that produces experienced leaders 15 years later? Toups does not pretend to have a neat answer. The uncertainty is the point. Technology promises efficiency in the present tense; leadership has to account for the capabilities a company may quietly stop growing.
In Athens, surrounded by biotech executives, politicians, activists, philosophers, bankers and hoteliers, Toups noticed that their leadership questions resembled his own. How does a team keep its identity while the work changes? How close should a leader remain to the ground? Where does conviction end and stubbornness begin? The software made these questions urgent, but not new.
That observation has softened the edges of his public style. Ninety days into the Hotwire job, he launched “A Coffee with Grant,” a series of compact conversations with colleagues. The first episode, with continental Europe CEO Ute Hildebrandt, kept the actual café sounds. The second, recorded with Asia-Pacific marketing leader Anol Bhattacharya in Athens, wandered through leadership, intuition, ownership and the responsibility that remains when technology participates in an outcome. It is an unusually modest format for a global CEO: two people, small table, no thunderous walk-on music.
The agency as a place to decide
Toups grew up in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and now lives in Los Angeles. The geographical arc is tidy; the professional one is more instructive. He has moved from employee number one to the leadership of a global agency, through roles devoted to operations, clients, technology and intelligence. Each job increased the scale. None removed the requirement to make disparate specialists act like colleagues.
His Hotwire ambition is explicit: become the global agency of choice for organizations telling consequential innovation stories. The test will not be whether the firm can make more content with AI. Almost everyone can. It will be whether Hotwire can connect reputation to revenue, deploy its own technology without letting the technology dictate the work and give clients counsel that survives contact with a difficult room.
This is where Toups’s two languages - systems and stories - finally meet. A system can detect a pattern, score a reputation and show which message traveled. A story can make somebody care. Between them sits the executive decision: what deserves amplification, which risk is real, who owns the result. For all the futurist vocabulary around his new post, Toups’s bet is almost old-fashioned. Tools will keep changing. A useful agency will remain a place where people exercise judgment together.