Ask a company why they moved to generated portraits and you get cost. Look at what triggered the decision and cost is almost never it.
One: the set stopped matching
The trigger is visual — someone looks at the team page and sees four styles. That happens about eighteen months after a session, because hiring did not stop.
Why consistency matters is the least contested claim in this area, and the mechanism is not aesthetic: a mixed page reads as an organisation that does not coordinate. Nobody chose to give that impression, which is precisely why it stings when someone points it out.
Two: a session cannot include everyone
Shifts, leave, travel, remote work. There is no date on which forty people are all available, and the traditional approach quietly produces a set with gaps in it.
The general argument leans on this more than on price, correctly.
Three: someone joined and there is no process
The one that makes it permanent. If adding person forty-one requires organising anything, it does not happen, and the drift restarts from zero.
Four, and last: cost
Real but rarely decisive, and usually compared wrongly. The invoice is not the number — two or three hours per person of travel, session and selection appear on no quote, and across forty people that is a week of paid time.
The gift version, which works and often backfires
Companies gifting portraits to employees is a genuine use with one failure mode: the recipient does not choose their own final image.
A portrait is a statement about how someone wants to be seen. Made on their behalf it lands as an assignment. Giving people the ability, and the choice of which to keep, is a different proposition entirely.
Reading further
The collected team material covers rollout mechanics, which is where these projects actually succeed or stall — rather than in the choice of vendor, which matters far less than the vendor pages suggest.
The check that comes before any of it
Count how many people already have a usable photograph that is simply cropped badly. It is often half, it costs nothing, and it halves the project.
