How I Added AI-Generated Headshots to Our Onboarding Flow in an Afternoon

Last month I was building out the user profile section of a SaaS app and ran into the most predictable problem: nobody uploads a decent profile photo. Half our users had the default avatar, a quarter had something blurry shot in bad lighting, and the rest had cropped group photos where you could still see a stranger's shoulder. I'd seen AI headshot generators as standalone web apps before, but I needed something I could wire into our existing backend - not another product my users had to visit separately. I wanted it to feel like a native feature.