Should Your Company Use AI-Generated Headshots?

Every few weeks an HR director or marketing lead asks me some version of this: employees can upload a few selfies and get a set of professional-looking headshots back in an hour for almost nothing. Why pay a corporate headshot photographer to come to the office?

It’s a fair question, and the answer isn’t “never.” It’s narrower than that.

What AI headshots do well

They’re fast, cheap, and consistent, and they solve the remote-employee problem. A company with people in Boston, New York, Austin, and Lisbon can’t easily get everyone in front of the same photographer, and AI headshots produce a matching set without anyone leaving their desk.

For an internal directory, a Slack avatar, or a startup’s first team page before the company has a public face, they’re adequate. Adequate is sometimes the right target.

Where they fail

They don’t look like the person. AI headshots produce a plausible professional who resembles the employee. The nose is a little straighter, the jaw a little sharper, the skin a little smoother. Individually it’s flattering. On a team page, it produces a row of people who all look like they belong to the same slightly uncanny family. Colleagues notice. So do clients who then meet the person.

They’re recognizable. People have seen enough of these now to identify them at a glance: the particular smoothness, the generic blazer, the background bokeh that doesn’t correspond to a real room. Once a team page reads as AI-generated, the signal it sends is “we cut this corner,” which for a law firm, a financial advisor, a hospital, or a school is the wrong message on the one page where clients are deciding whether to trust you.

They can’t do environmental work. Executive portraits, workplace photography, anything that shows a real person in a real place is outside what a generator can honestly produce. It can produce an image of a person in an office. It can’t produce an image of your CEO in your office.

Employees don’t like them. In my experience, people who’ve been given AI headshots are quietly embarrassed by them. Being photographed by a person, badly or well, is something that happened to you. A generated headshot is something that was done about you.

The honest comparison

The question isn’t AI versus a photographer. It’s what the image is for.

If it’s for an internal tool nobody outside the company sees, use whatever is cheapest. If it’s for the public team page, the website, press, or LinkedIn for client-facing staff, it’s worth photographing people properly. An on-site corporate headshot session in Boston or New York costs less per person than most companies expect, and it’s a once-a-year expense with a recurring hour for new hires.

The companies most tempted to use AI headshots are usually the ones whose business depends most on being trusted by strangers. That’s the whole argument.

Where this is going

The generated images will get better and harder to spot. What won’t change is that a photograph is evidence that a specific person was in a specific room on a specific day, and a generated image is not. As every organization gains access to unlimited plausible imagery, the evidence gets more valuable, not less. A company’s headshots are the smallest, cheapest place to demonstrate that it deals in the real thing.

Evan Scales photographs corporate headshots, executive portraits, and workplace photography for companies in Boston and New York City, and works with independent schools, universities, and healthcare organizations across the Northeast.