Bravely AI Browsing with Leo

Introduction

Data professionals live in their browsers. You're reading technical documentation, analyzing research papers, reviewing model cards, working through GitHub repositories, and summarizing industry reports — often all in the same afternoon. Increasingly, AI assistants sit alongside that work.

The tools most people reach for (Chrome with Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT in a pinned tab) are genuinely capable. But each carries a privacy cost that's easy to overlook when you're focused on getting work done. Consumer Gemini may use your conversations to improve Google's services, and selected conversations can be reviewed by human staff. Perplexity routes your queries and page content to its cloud servers for processing. ChatGPT, unless you actively opt out, can use your inputs for model training.

For casual browsing, this is an acceptable tradeoff. For data professionals working with proprietary datasets, client research, unreleased model architectures, or sensitive business intelligence, it may not be.

Brave Leo is the alternative most people haven't considered. It's a privacy-first AI assistant built directly into the Brave browser — not a separate tab or third-party extension, but a sidebar that reads what you're currently looking at and responds without storing, logging, or training on anything you share. The free tier requires no account and no sign-up. And it has a model lineup that's more capable than most people expect.

This article covers what Leo does, how it compares to the tools you already use, how to set it up, and how to build a private AI workflow around it.

Step 1: Understanding Why Privacy in AI Browsing Matters for Data Professionals

Before getting into Leo's features, it helps to understand what's actually happening when you use mainstream browser AI tools, because the data handling differences are structural, not cosmetic.

Step 2: Getting Started With Leo

Choosing your model is done from within the Leo sidebar. The free tier includes: