AI is rewriting elements of executive hiring while reinforcing others that have been around for decades. Senior Partner Kyle Rudy recently shared with Business of Fashion what those shifts actually look like.
"It starts the minute you shake their hand in the lobby to the minute you walk them to the elevator and say 'goodbye,' you could literally be talking about anything, but you're making inferences based on how they choose to answer open-ended questions." The observation cuts to something AI hasn't been able to touch: at the top of the market, the fundamentals of how exceptional leaders are identified haven't shifted as much as the noise suggests.
The qualities commanding the highest premiums — resilience, agility, adaptability, the capacity to contribute as a thought partner beyond a functional area — are the same ones that mattered in the pandemic era, the recession era, and the dot-com era. What has sharpened is the emphasis on judgment, taste, and discernment: the human capacity to prioritize when AI makes almost everything technically possible. When every execution is within reach, deciding what's worth doing becomes one of the most valuable things a leader can bring.
The Resume Still Matters, But Not in the Way You Think
At the executive level, the resume has always been a secondary signal. The strongest candidates are typically passive - not applying but being sought out. By the time a formal conversation begins, a picture of who someone is has likely been built through relationships and referrals. AI has accelerated that dynamic across the broader market, but at the top it simply reinforces what was already true: the document is almost a formality.
What still cuts through is specificity. As Rudy told BoF: "What stands out on the résumé is not that you drove revenue growth, but the actual number — and is it statistically significant? Not that you led cross-functional relationships, but what those relationships built and what changed because of it." The polish AI provides is now table stakes, and proof of real impact is what separates candidates.
The practical response has been a higher bar everywhere else, through deeper behavioral interviewing, more rigorous assessment, and more intensive referencing. The resume may open the door, but the conversation determines everything else.
Demand for Creative Leaders Has Never Been Higher
Two years ago, widespread anxiety surrounded AI's potential disruption of creative roles. What has actually happened is the opposite. AI-generated content is now relatively ubiquitous, and much of it has been dismissed as undifferentiated and flat. Companies across fashion, beauty, retail, and DTC have responded not by leaning further into automation, but by elevating the role of the creative executives capable of overseeing that output and ensuring it holds together across product, storytelling, digital experience, stores, and campaigns.
Demand for Creative Directors and executive-level brand leaders is higher in 2026 than in any recent year, not just at European luxury houses, but at workwear brands, DTC companies, and mass-market retailers.
The New Premium: Judgement Over Credentials
The evolution of AI-specific requirements in job specifications tells its own story. Roughly 18 months ago, AI barely came up in executive hiring conversations that weren't overtly technical. Then it appeared in nearly every brief, from leading tool adoption to ensuring best practices. Some companies moved so aggressively that AI mandates gave way to caps on utilization within the span of a year or two. Today, for non-technical roles, explicit AI requirements have largely disappeared. The pendulum has swung back, and what's replaced them is a sharper focus on something harder to teach: judgment, taste, and discernment. The capacity to make the right call when every option is technically available is emerging as one of the defining executive competencies of this moment.
That's ultimately what AI hasn't been able to replicate in the search process itself. A candidate might list "global" seven times on a resume when their actual international exposure is a fraction of the business. Identifying that gap and understanding what it means for a specific role requires the kind of contextual reasoning that comes from relationships, referrals, and years of conversation.
Read the full Business of Fashion piece: How to Get Hired in the Age of AI