Dollar Shave Club’s bet: AI makes agencies optional, not obsolete

It’s not because she believes agencies are heading for extinction. On the contrary, the former Procter & Gamble marketer thinks they still have plenty to offer — just less for a challenger brand of Dollar Shave Club’s size that leans on being nimble and fast rather than farming out its “irreverent” voice. AI, in her telling, just compounds that advantage.

“Because human production is really expensive, especially for us as challenger brands,” said Higgins. “We have to lean into these tools that make things less expensive and faster, so that we have money left over for the human shots, where we’re able to lean into the actual people and the actual production.”

Take the brand’s 4th of July campaign. Higgins wrote the brief herself — a parallel between the American colonists’ revolt 250 years ago and Dollar Shave Club’s own founding swipe at corporate malaise in 2012. From there, her small in-house team of copywriters, comedians, conceptors and marketers, using Claude and the AI video tool Higgsfield, turned that idea into ads like an eagle chasing a hot dog or a cartoonish riff on Washington crossing the Delaware. The brief to first draft took two to three days. A finished 30-second cut took about a week. The whole campaign, multiple asset sizes included, was live within a month.

“There’s no way in the old world we would be able to go from idea to launch in a month,” Higgins said.

That’s the 10% Dollar Shave Club is chasing. By Higgins’ own account, the only time the brand still goes outside is when the team is out of capacity or when an idea needs “external chops” it doesn’t have in-house. AI has started closing the first door. A campaign that would once have needed an external shop’s time and budget got done by a handful of people. 

Ubiquitous AI

While Dollar Shave Club is all in on AI that doesn’t mean its ads will always be made by them. 

A separate, upcoming campaign honoring military members, “Shavers That Never Waver”, is all real footage of real service members —”that’s something I would never have AI do,” Higgins said.

A racier product launch, on the other hand — for a new item called Ball Spray, coming in mid-July — will be “100% AI” for the opposite reason: it’s not something she can put real people in front of a camera for, since it involves men driving around with testicle-shaped ornaments hanging off their pickup trucks — a real, if niche, phenomenon Higgins is leaning into for the launch and one no real person is signing up to star in.

That contrast is the whole logic of her approach. The military campaign needed to be real because faking sacrifice would cheapen it. The truck-nut campaign could be entirely synthetic because nothing sincere was ever at stake. AI, in other words, isn’t restricted to the boring parts of production. It’s restricted from the parts where realness itself is the meaning. Which is why Higgins won’t put a ratio on AI-made versus human-made work. It isn’t a formula so much as a judgment call made campaign by campaign, based on what the subject demands.

“[AI] isn’t the strategy, it’s an execution device,” said Higgins. “You need to have your really competent people in order to come up with the right concept to make sure it’s funny, to make sure it has a synergy with whatever that event is, or that product, and then AI is what helps bring it to life.”

That’s backed by three checkpoints. By her account, none of them are formal. The brief comes from her. She walks the team through it herself. And before anything ships, there’s one more filter: her creatives “walking into my office and saying, what do you think of this”. There’s no elongated, corporate-style process. Rather, it’s just Higgins, twice, plus a gut check at the end. 

“Procter and Gamble, and other large companies are very process-oriented whereas Dollar Shave Club is pretty scrappy,” Higgins said. “So a lot of the checkpoints involve my creative team walking into my office and saying, ‘what do you think of this’.”

Her stance will change as AI reshapes how Dollar Shave Club’s marketers work day to day. For now, though, it’s the brand’s version of the “AI in the loop, humans at the helm” line that’s become the industry’s default answer to the same question. 

Checks and balances

For all the freedom AI gives her team, Higgins is clear-eyed about its downsides too: the anxiety it stirs in marketers, the suspicion it draws from viewers, and the cost of using it.

On the first, she treats it as a management job: showing staff that AI “can make it so they can spend their time being creative,” not that it’s coming for them.

On the second, her answer is disclosure over denial. Dollar Shave Club leans into obviously fake AI imagery — an eagle chasing a hot dog, an oversized George Washington head — instead of hiding it. New York’s new AI-disclosure law, she said, only reinforces that instinct: “we want to make sure not to lie to our consumers.”

And as for cost, she’s learned by overspending. “I’m sure the first month that I was here, I overused it. I have no idea what that bill looks like,” she said. Now she matches tool to task — cheaper models for simple work, pricier ones only when the job needs it.

What Dollar Shave Club’s approach really shows is that AI isn’t changing what brands want to do, it’s changing who’s structurally fast enough to do it. A lean, in-house team is now outpacing what bigger, slower operations, agency or corporate, can deliver, because AI removes the capacity constraint that used to force work outside. That’s a mirror of the adoption gap playing out industry-wide, just inverted: here, small beats big. If more challenger brands follow Higgins’ math, ad agencies may find their value increasingly measured by ideas alone, not execution — the part AI is already quietly taking off their hands.

“For small in-house teams using AI tools to accelerate, the key is having a team that has the talent to avoid the negative perception of AI slop while delivering creative that audiences find value in,” said Matt Owens, chief design and innovation officer, at brand studio Athletics. “The tension between speed and AI slop is real and it is only the teams that have strong command over AI tools to create work that is on brand, high fidelity, and seamlessly integrated into the real world that win.”