Apr 29, 2026
Surprises on corporate earnings calls are usually limited to financial matters. Investors and analysts generally aren't braced to learn that the CEO who has been guiding them through the most recent quarter's results isn't real. But Customer Bank shareholders got that unexpected nugget of news in the bank's call last Friday.
CEO Sam Sidhu had been speaking for about half an hour (1) before he made an unusual announcement. "The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me," Sidhu said.
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It's the sort of stunt that's likely to divide an audience. Some might roll their eyes, but Sidhu said he did it to show "what we mean when we say AI is not an experiment at Customers Bank. We will be using it to transform our company."
As part of that vow, the financial institution has signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI, which will see the AI company help automate lending and client onboarding, CNBC reports (2). That's expected to improve the bank's efficiency ratio from 49% to the low 40s, which the bank says will help its bottom line. For its part, OpenAI is developing finance tools it could eventually sell to other financial institutions.
Customers Bank will roll out the AI agents over the next six to 12 months. The goal is to reduce closing times from the current 30–45-day period to just a week. And opening a commercial account will take just 20 minutes instead of a full day.
"When you have an autonomous agent, you're essentially creating a digital worker … and they can work around the clock," Sidhu told CNBC.
Not quite groundbreaking
While Sidhu said he believed the use of an AI clone on an earnings call was "a first in the history of public company earnings calls," it actually wasn't.
In May of 2023, PlayStudios founder/CEO Andrew Pascal's voice on the first half of the earnings call was not only delivered by an AI clone of his voice, but written by a chatbot. The surprise was revealed right before Pascal and his team took questions from analysts. (Even the Securities and Exchange Commission wasn't told of the stunt in advance.)
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"I'm fascinated with AI, as I think we all should be," said Pascal (3) at the time. "It really can and should impact every role throughout the company. That's something I've been evangelizing, so what better way to really demonstrate to my teams internally than to take it on myself and see how and where I can be applying it in a way to make me more productive. … This seemed to me like an intriguing way to really reinforce the idea that there isn't a role in the company, including mine, that won't be impacted by it."
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Employment impacts
While pronouncements like the ones at Customers Bank might stoke fears of AI doing away with more jobs, some analysts are tamping down those fears.
Goldman Sachs, in a report last August (4), said it expected AI to "have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels." If current AI use cases were expanded across the economy, it said, just 2.5% of U.S. jobs would be at risk.
Forrester seems to agree the fears are overwrought, but has a slightly higher estimate, predicting (5) 6.1% of jobs in the U.S. will be lost to AI and automation by 2030.
"In the next five years, the future of work will remain largely human," it wrote. "AI will take over increasing numbers of workflows and tasks, but workflows and tasks aren't jobs."
Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our ethics and guidelines.
Yahoo Finance (1); CNBC (2); Fast Company (3); Goldman Sachs (4); Forrester (5)
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience, the majority of which were spent with some of the Internet’s biggest sites, including CNNMoney.com, where he was director of content development, and Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor. His work has also appeared on Fortune, Fast Company, Inc., CNBC.com, AARP, Nasdaq.com, and Voice of America, as well as dozens of other national publications.
