Meet the guide dog who trains harder than a gym bro

The real guide dogs are busy working. So, the South African Guide-Dogs Association for the Blind and VML created a digital double to do their publicity. Meet Maxx Reps.

If you’ve ever watched an assistance dog at work, you’ll know they’re athletes in their own right – alert, disciplined, focused, and trained to an astonishingly high standard.

The South African Guide-Dogs Association for the Blind (GDA) wanted to give the public a peek into that world. But there was one small challenge: real assistance dogs don’t have time to film content. They’re too busy transforming people’s lives.

So, GDA partnered with VML to do the next best thing: they built an AI pupfluencer based on a real dog. His name is Maxx Reps, and he’s ready to take you inside the grind.

“We realised the real dogs were busy with their training,” says Pippa Browning, copywriter at VML. “So, rather than pulling them out of lessons to make videos, we created a digital version who could share the story on their behalf.”

Real-dog inspiration with a mission-focused mindset

Maxx is inspired by an actual working guide dog named Solo, a parkrun-loving, fitness-obsessed, endlessly enthusiastic little power pup who stole hearts long before he became the inspiration for South Africa’s first guide-dog gym bro.

“When we showed the client the concept and the early renders, they immediately recognised Solo,” says Tilesh Bhaga, creative director – digital & innovation at VML. “They said, ‘That’s exactly him.’ The personality fit was perfect.”

“They’re very similar!” confirms Sekelwa Mpambo, social media manager at GDA, who says Solo has always been a natural leader and was the “prefect” of his guide dog class. “From puppyhood, Solo was outpacing littermates and was always pushing himself throughout training, hardly distracted, and he would encourage good behaviour from his classmates too. Solo passed all his major assessments with flying colours because of his ‘locked-in’ approach to task work. You will hardly find Solo ‘goofing’ around. He is a proud and confident dog.”

Those characteristics became the ideal blueprint for Maxx, who is built to mimic the kind of gym-bro influencer we all know: klapping it hard in the gym, cold-plunging, giving ‘it’s all you, Boet’ energy. Except his workouts are grounded in the training real assistance dogs do every day.

And that’s the clever twist: Maxx may be entertaining, but all his content references something real – the gear assistance dogs need, the skills they practise, and the funding it takes to get them from puppyhood to graduation.

Why use AI? Because the real heroes are busy

In the last year, AI content has earned a stigma for being a quick way to churn out sub-par video content. This is not that.

“Maxx was definitely not a shortcut,” says Andre de Jager, art director at VML, who brought him to life. “It takes two-to-three hours to build about 15 seconds of video – and that’s after a full storyboard has been developed. Honestly, it would have been much simpler just to film a real dog, but we couldn’t take them out of training.”

The painstaking process involves:

crafting a character-appropriate script
recording a voiceover
designing a storyboard that aligns with that voice
generating and refining the AI dog’s performance frame by frame
syncing lip movements, gestures, and continuity
ensuring he looks like the same dog in every shot
editing the final video to match trending sounds and formats

“You have to obsess over every detail,” says Browning. “Same harness, same colouring, same setting, same vibe. And then also accept that some things will never be perfect with AI, so you learn to wing it, catch mistakes, and keep it fun.”

The final result? A satirical character with the heart of a real guide dog and a purpose to raise funds to support their training. “Our first reaction was, “This is so cool! And what a perfect fit for our brand!” says Vanda Harries, Head of Marketing at GDA. “He’s perfect to attract a new audience for us, using new technology like AI in a smart and very relevant way and, of course, the pure entertainment value… who wouldn’t love Maxx?”

Mutt on a mission

GDA relies heavily on donations – which often come from older supporters and corporate funders. But younger donors, who have more disposable income, are harder to reach. So, the team decided to meet them where they spend a lot of their time already: following influencers on social media.

“Maxx Reps will have his own Instagram and TikTok, with content shared to YouTube and Facebook,” explains Brett David, business unit director at VML. “This will be linked to GDA’s social media accounts, with some posts shared across those accounts. We want people to say, ‘What is the South African Guide-Dogs Association doing?’”

Alongside the content stream, Maxx has his own donation tracker: a public progress bar showing how close he is to “graduation”, with every rand raised going directly towards training real assistance dogs. “People invest emotionally in a character more easily than a faceless charity page,” explains Bhaga. The more people who feel inspired to donate towards Maxx, the more assistance dogs can be trained.

Get involved: Follow Maxx. Share Maxx. Help real dogs graduate

Maxx Reps may be an AI character, but the impact he’s driving is very real. Every like, follow, share and donation helps fund the training of assistance dogs who will one day become someone’s eyes and key to independence.

Follow Maxx, keep an eye on his progress bar, and help him make it to graduation – for himself, and for all the real assistance dogs he represents. The real dogs are busy doing what they do best. Maxx is here to make sure the world sees why that work matters.