The observation
The raw material required to convincingly impersonate a senior executive is now mostly public and mostly free. A few minutes of conference video, a podcast appearance, an earnings call, a handful of clear photos, and a public bio are enough to approximate someone’s face, voice, and manner well enough to fool a hurried employee on a video call or a vendor reading an email. The barrier used to be skill and money. It is now closer to patience and a search engine.
Why it matters
Executives are a high-value target for a specific reason: other people act on their word, quickly, and often without verifying. A request that appears to come from a CEO carries built-in authority, and that authority is exactly what an impersonation borrows. The more visible the executive, and the more their organization is trained to move fast on their instructions, the larger the gap between how real a fake needs to be and how real people actually expect it to be before they act.
Practical implication
The fix is not less visibility. For most executives, visibility is the job. The fix is verification that does not depend on appearance: agreed callback procedures for anything involving money, credentials, or access; a canonical channel for sensitive requests; and a culture where asking a senior person to confirm is treated as competence, not insubordination. The goal is an organization that is hard to exploit even when the executive is easy to imitate. This is the human side of the AI Exposure Index.