AI has taken over corporate coding, employee calendar management, job applicant screening, and is now even leading important corporate conference calls.
Customers Bank recently held an earnings conference with analysts to discuss its first-quarter results, but 30 minutes into the meeting, CEO Sam Sidhu shocked the audience with a confession. Up until that point, an AI replica of myself had been sitting on the conference call.
“The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone and were not read by me,” Sidhu said in a Friday call. CNBC.
The leader of the $25.9 billion asset lender explained the reasoning behind his stunt. Sidhu was trying to draw attention to the AI-powered shift underway at Customers Bank. The company signed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI to enhance innovation. The Silicon Valley giant will staff the company full-time with engineers and deploy AI agents across its commercial banking operations, making it one of the “first AI-enabled regional banks in the U.S.,” the company’s press release said. The company also noted that the transformation has been several years in the making, with the bank’s implementation of ChatGPT Enterprise beginning its partnership with OpenAI in 2023, and that 75% of its employees now use tools powered by the AI company. Approximately 600 employees also recently participated in an AI masterclass call.
“We are investing heavily in training to ensure that every member of our team has access to AI tools and can use them with confidence,” said the CEO of Customers Bancorp Inc. and Customers Bank. luck In a written statement.
“This is what our people are leaning towards,” Sidhu continues. “The goal is to eliminate repetitive administrative tasks so employees can focus on what they do best. We’re eliminating boring, time-consuming tasks that get in the way of critical thinking and judgment, rather than replacing it.”
CEOs launching AI clones
Customer bank CEOs aren’t the only business leaders using digital twins in their operations. Currently, technological clones of CEOs are being built to assist with employee engagement, earnings reporting, and internal communications.
Meta made headlines earlier this month for building an AI version of CEO Mark Zuckerberg to work with the $1.71 trillion tech giant’s employees, according to the newspaper. financial times. Zuckerberg’s clone is just one of several AI-powered 3D characters the company is developing that users can control at their whims. MetaStaff could potentially converse with a trained virtual double and get feedback about his mannerisms, tone, public statements, and feelings about the company’s strategy.
Other companies are already deploying AI clones of their leaders in a similar way to Customers Bank. In early 2025, an AI version of Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski was used in the company’s first quarter earnings video. And that’s just one aspect of what’s likely to change in the technology transformation of buy now, pay later businesses. Thanks to AI-driven efficiencies, the CEO predicted that the number of employees will fall from 3,000 to less than 2,000 by 2030.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan also got in on the trend, having his AI shadow attend 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 tech twins to do heavy lifting. Back in 2024, Yuan became interested in creating AI avatars so employees could delegate tedious tasks like handling boring meetings, emails, and phone calls to their twins.
“You can participate by sending a digital version of yourself, so you can go to the beach,” the Zoom CEO said. The Verge In 2024.
“Today, we all spend a lot of time making phone calls, attending meetings, sending emails, deleting spam emails, and replying to text messages, and we’re still very busy,” the billionaire continued. “how [do we] If you want to leverage AI, how can you leverage Zoom Workplace to fully automate those tasks?”
