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A challenge for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies is the flood of content that’s tough for any brand to outpace. For Colgate-Palmolive, which sells its essential health and hygiene products to consumers in 200 countries and territories across oral care, personal care, home care, and pet nutrition, the stakes are clear: show up in the moments that matter, in the channels that matter, at global scale.
The 219-year-old company has a long record of turning innovation into mass adoption. In 1896, Colgate introduced the collapsible toothpaste tube, transforming oral care into a mass-market category. Today, the Colgate brand is found in more homes than any other.1
Carrying that innovative legacy forward, Brigitte King, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief digital and insights officer, is leading a generative AI pilot, in partnership with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a Colgate-Palmolive division. The goal is to build and prove a repeatable model centered on what she calls the “3 Vs” of content: volume, variety, and velocity. The pilot demonstrates how even a 219-year-old incumbent can reset how marketing gets done.
Keep pilots small, efficient and stay close to the work. Get your hands dirty.
This 3V model is grounded in Colgate-Palmolive’s efforts around omnichannel demand generation, a unified way of creating seamless brand experiences for consumers — showing up for people in the right moments, on the right platforms, and with the right content. By leveraging insights gathered across channels, the AI-powered model helps create on-brand content faster, at scale, to drive growth.
King launched this gen-AI pilot with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, a division with an unwavering commitment to science-led nutrition for dogs and cats. With a cross-functional team of Hill’s marketers, internal digital specialists, BCG, and Google technologists, the goal was to create a video ad that met the company’s creative standards at a whole new speed and for a lower cost.
“Marketers are creative people,” King says. “They love to think about big ideas for brands and the art of storytelling. Our content-creation gen-AI pilot put the creative tools back in their hands, because it unlocked the immediate opportunity to bring ideas to life like never before and to do it with quality creative that counts.”
The results
The results defied expectations. King said the team produced two consumer-ready video ads 4X to 6X faster than the usual production time. Costs were significantly lower per concept, and the ads achieved the same or better consideration lift compared to business-as-usual creative.
One spot even used gen AI to create “very natural and real” looking animal characters, according to King, which can be challenging to achieve.
The 3V content framework is the vision, and AI tools are the enabler for marketing teams under pressure to scale content that creates and stimulates demand for their brands. It provides a clear path to break the bottleneck. A 2025 BCG report quantifies the opportunity. Marketing organizations can unlock 10% to 30% of total spend by fixing content inefficiencies, with 22% of CMOs expecting savings of more than 20% on content creation alone. Working with BCG and Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Colgate-Palmolive’s Global Digital team created the conditions for this successful pilot.
A focused, people-first approach
King’s lesson: “Keep pilots small, efficient and stay close to the work,” she says. “Get your hands dirty,” she says. “When teams get too large, you can have too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Beyond this content-creation gen-AI pilot, Colgate-Palmolive is advancing its digital transformation with an enterprise-wide investment in AI upskilling. For example, the company has provided employees at all levels with access to Google Workspace with Gemini, where employees can use Google’s latest text, image, and video models to learn by doing in a safe and company-compliant way. The goal is to equip thousands of employees to use AI as a tool to boost creativity, innovation, efficiency, and productivity in their daily roles.
For King, pilots are not just tests of new tools, but signals for how an organization learns, scales, and adapts. And the link back to corporate strategy is important and deliberate.
“The whole point of us doing all of this is to fulfill the larger purpose of Colgate-Palmolive: to reimagine a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet, and to support business growth,” she says. “Your efforts always have to thread back to a bigger reason why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
