--- title: "Bank CEO Brags He Used AI Clone of Himself to Host Conference Call" description: "Sam Sidhu, the CEO of Customers Bank, said he had an AI clone speak for himself during a recent conference call." date: "2026-05-02" modified: "2026-05-02" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/bank-ceo-ai-clone-call" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # Bank CEO Brags He Used AI Clone of Himself to Host Conference Call ![A humanoid robot with a smooth, pale blue face and black eyes, dressed in a dark suit, shirt, and tie, set against a deep blue background with subtle red lighting on one side of the face.]() *Getty / Futurism* If you decided to blow off a Zoom meeting by sending an AI dummy instead, you might find yourself out of a job. But when a head honcho does it, it's a masterfully executed stunt, a sign of a business genius who's got his finger on the pulse. Take Sam Sidhu, the CEO of Customers Bank. During a conference call discussing the company's latest earnings reports, he waited nearly an hour before revealing that it was actually an AI that had been speaking all along, [*CNBC* reports]() — which, to be honest, feels like a huge waste of everyone's time. "The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me," Sidhu said, bragging that it was a potential first for a public company earnings call. (Whether anyone was actually fooled is unclear.) As it turns out, Customers Bank recently signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI to deploy its AI models across the bank, as well as collaborate to create custom AI capabilities tailored to its banking operations, it [announced Monday](). Sidhu's suspiciously handsome AI clone was intended to draw attention to the new collab, as well as unintentionally to his own vanity. Sidhu is expecting the AI to have an absolutely incredible impact, telling *CNBC* he projects AI will improve the company's efficiency ratio — which is calculated by dividing a company's non-interest operating costs by revenue — from 49 percent to the low 40s. As OpenAI's AI agents are rolled out across the bank over the next six to twelve months, he expects the time it takes to close a commercial loan to go down from upwards of 30 days to just seven. And opening accounts for commercial clients, which typically can take over a day, will be completed in just twenty minutes. "When you have an autonomous agent, you're essentially creating a digital worker... and they can work around the clock," Sidhu told *CNBC*. These are bold predictions, given that AI agents remain error prone and have caused numerous incidents at major corporations that have embraced them, including Amazon and Meta. But AI fever has long taken hold in the c-suite, and Sidhu is far from the first CEO to [create an AI simulacrum of themselves](). Chief among them is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is reportedly building a CEO AI agent to [help him do do his job]() — on top of becoming omnipresent by building a "photorealistic" AI [clone]() that staff can turn to for advice at any time. **More on AI:** [*Sam Altman Caught in What May Be His Most Spectacular Lie Yet*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()