The CEO Profile in the Age of AI

There is a great deal being written at the moment about the changing profile of the CEO.

AI literacy is becoming part of the expectation. Boards are looking for leaders who can make good decisions in environments where technology is moving faster than traditional planning cycles. Adaptability, communication, emotional intelligence and the ability to lead people through continual change are being discussed alongside the more established expectations of commercial performance and strategic judgement.

It is an interesting shift, because the conversation isn't really about CEOs becoming more technical. It is about what becomes more important when technology can do more of the technical work.

Judgement, perspective, communication and relationships. The ability to read a situation, make a decision and bring people with you.

As usual I'm over here thinking about another part of the CEO profile that receives considerably less attention: how we visually represent the people occupying these roles.

Executive photography has traditionally been quite controlled. Not necessarily formal, but considered. We choose the environment, the light, the position of the person, where they look, what they do with their hands and, to some extent, the expression we want to capture.

There is a reason for that, CEO portrait has a job to do. But I think the job has become much bigger.

The CEO is no longer represented primarily through a company website, annual report and occasional piece of media coverage. Their image now appears across LinkedIn, media, investor communications, podcasts, conference programmes, recruitment, internal communications, industry commentary and video.

And that makes me question the idea that we can adequately represent a modern CEO through a collection of controlled portraits alone.

The question I find myself increasingly interested in is not, what should this CEO look like?

It is, what does their leadership look like? there is a significant difference.

The first question is largely about appearance. The second takes us into behaviour, environment, interaction and presence.

How does this person communicate? How do they listen? How do they engage with their people? What happens when they are thinking rather than posing? How do they hold a room? What does their energy feel like? What does leadership look like when they aren't looking directly into a lens?

These aren't necessarily the photographs we once thought of as the CEO portrait. I think they are becoming some of the most important ones. AI makes this particularly interesting.

We have entered a period where polished professional communication is incredibly easy to create. A biography can be rewritten in seconds. A speech can be sharpened. An article can be generated. Corporate messaging can be refined and repurposed almost instantly.

That doesn't diminish the value of good communication. But it does mean that polish itself is becoming less distinctive. As more professional communication becomes easier to manufacture, the genuinely individual parts of leadership become more interesting.

The way somebody thinks, their manner, expressions, energy, their relationships with other people and the way they occupy the environment they lead.

Photography has an extraordinary ability to capture those things, but only if we allow it to.

This is where I think the idea of the CEO headshot needs to become broader. A CEO doesn't simply need a photograph, they need a visual vocabulary.

There will always be a place for a strong portrait looking directly at the camera. I certainly don't see that disappearing, but it can sit within something much richer.

The leader in conversation, listening and working with their executive team, addressing a room. Walking through the business, thinking, laughing, concentrating and engaging with the people around them.

Some images will carry authority, others will carry energy. Some will be quieter, some will show the person in a way a traditional portrait simply cannot.

Together, they begin to create a visual narrative of leadership rather than simply a record of what the CEO looks like and that matters because those photographs have work to do.

The image accompanying financial results has a very different job from the image used for a culture story. A media interview needs something different again. Recruitment, industry commentary, internal communication, speaking engagements and LinkedIn all create different contexts.

Using the same photograph everywhere doesn't create consistency. It can simply reveal that there isn't enough visual material to work with.

This isn't about turning CEOs into influencers or creating an endless stream of content around them. In fact, I think executive visibility needs considerably more judgement than that. It's about recognising that the CEO has become a much more visible part of an organisation's communication and building the imagery around them accordingly.

For me as a photographer, that makes the work far more interesting.

I'm not trying to manufacture a version of leadership for the camera. I'm interested in finding what is already there. Yes, the light, composition and environment matters. All the technical elements still matter, but the photograph also needs room for something to happen. Because perhaps our visual definition of authority needs to evolve alongside our definition of leadership.

The CEO being described in 2026 is expected to navigate AI, workforce transformation, culture, uncertainty, stakeholder scrutiny and continual change. They still need authority, but increasingly we are also talking about judgement, clarity, adaptability, communication and humanity.

Those qualities don't always reveal themselves when somebody is standing exactly where I've asked them to stand, doing exactly what I've asked them to do.

Sometimes the stronger photograph happens when I stop directing quite so much and start observing and perhaps that is the opportunity for executive photography in the AI era.

As technology becomes increasingly capable of manufacturing the polished parts of professional communication, we have an opportunity to pay more attention to the parts of leadership that aren't manufactured at all.

The person, behaviour, relationships and presence.

The CEO profile of the AI era shouldn't look less human, I think it should look considerably more so.