CEO of a $25.9 billion bank had his AI clone lead the company’s earnings call—as Mark Zuckerberg builds his own digital twin

Customers Bank recently held an earnings call to talk over first-quarter results with analysts, but 30 minutes into the meeting, CEO Sam Sidhu rocked the room with a confession: up until that point, an AI replica of himself had been in the driver’s seat of the call. 

“The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me,” Sidhu said during the Friday call, as reported by CNBC.

The leader of the $25.9 billion asset lender laid out the reasoning behind his stunt: Sidhu was seeking to draw attention to the AI-enabled shift underway at Customers Bank. The business has signed onto a multi-year contract with OpenAI to ramp up its tech innovation; the Silicon Valley giant will embed engineers at the company and deploy AI agents across commercial banking operations, making it one of the “first AI-enabled regional banks in the United States,” the company’s press release said. The business also noted that it’s years into its transformation—its partnership with OpenAI began in 2023 with the bank’s deployment of ChatGPT Enterprise—and today 75% of its employees use tools powered by the AI company. Around 600 workers also recently took part in an AI masterclass call.

“We’re investing heavily in making sure every member of our team has access to AI tools and the training to use them confidently,” the CEO of Customers Bancorp Inc. and Customers Bank tells Fortune in a written statement.

“This is something our people are leaning into,” Sidhu continues. “The goal is to remove the repetitive, administrative work so our people can focus on what they do best—we’re not replacing critical thinking and judgment, we’re removing the tedious, time-consuming work that gets in the way of it.”

The CEOs launching AI clones

The Customers Bank CEO isn’t the only business leader tapping their digital twin on the job—now, tech clones of chief executives are being built to assist with employee engagement, earnings calls, and internal communication. 

Earlier this month, Meta made headlines for building an AI version of its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to engage with employees at the $1.71 trillion tech giant, according to the Financial Times. Zuckerberg’s clone is just one of the AI-powered 3D characters the business is developing, which users can interact with on a whim. Meta staffers could potentially converse with and get feedback from the virtual double trained on his mannerisms, tone, public statements, and sentiments about the company’s strategy.

Other companies have already deployed AI clones of their leaders in a similar fashion to Customers Bank. At the start of 2025, an AI version of Klarna’s cofounder and CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, was used in a video about the company’s first-quarter earnings. And it’s just one facet of what may change during the buy-now-pay-later business’s tech transformation—thanks to efficiencies from AI, the CEO predicted his workforce will decrease from 3,000 employees to fewer than 2,000 by 2030.

Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan has also caught onto the trend—he enlisted an AI double of himself for the video conferencing platform’s first-quarter earnings call earlier this year. And he sees a future where CEOs aren’t the only ones sending their tech twins to do the busywork; back in 2024, Yuan expressed interest in creating AI avatars so that workers can enlist the twin for grunt work, like handling tedious meetings, emails, and phone calls.

“I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach,” the Zoom CEO told The Verge in 2024. 

“Today we all spend a lot of time either making phone calls, joining meetings, sending emails, deleting some spam emails, and replying to some text messages, still very busy,” the billionaire continued. “How [do we] leverage AI, how do we leverage Zoom Workplace, to fully automate that kind of work?”