Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu recently held a quarterly analyst call. Thirty minutes in, he admitted that the opening remarks hadn't been delivered by him at all — but by his digital clone. The bank manages $26 billion in assets, the call was about as high-stakes as it gets, and in those thirty minutes not one listener noticed the swap.
Sidhu isn't the first
Earlier this year, an avatar of Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski presented the company's quarterly results, and a couple days later Zoom founder Eric Yuan did the same on his earnings call. Neither one warned anyone they were watching a digital copy. They told people afterward. Yuan built his double using Zoom's own feature and has been saying for a year that he wants to send it to meetings in his place — not just to read scripts, but to make decisions on his behalf.
Meta has gone furthest
Zuckerberg is building a photorealistic 3D replica of himself — trained on his speech patterns, facial expressions, and public appearances — so that 79,000 employees can interact with it. He's personally involved in the training: the idea is that talking to the copy will make people feel connected to the actual human in charge.
Broadcasting today, deciding tomorrow
For now, all of this works like a broadcast. The avatar reads pre-written, pre-approved text — it isn't negotiating or responding to anything live. But these doubles are being built with the explicit expectation that one day they'll handle things on their own.
AI has already learned to fire people — Klarna announced last year that it would cut its headcount from three thousand to under two thousand by 2030, through automation. Now the AI boss will be making the calls.
A new layer is forming inside corporations. Before, the barrier between you and the big boss was a secretary and a PR team — real people you could at least get a message through. Now, standing between you and the executive is his own digital copy: looks like him, sounds like him, creates the feeling of a personal conversation, and decides absolutely nothing. Actually talking to the real human at the top becomes a privilege for the few. Everyone else gets a polite render.
Can I speak to a real person?