Pa. bank CEO lets AI clone take over investor call, surprising analysts
Customers Bancorp CEO Sam Sidhu said he wanted a live demonstration on how the Malvern bank could use AI tools.
For nearly half an hour at his quarterly public conference call with analysts and investors, Sam Sidhu, CEO of Malvern-based Customers Bancorp, held forth on the company’s recent results — more loans, more deposits, a bad apartment-development deal — and especially on his hopes for artificial intelligence.
“AI represents the biggest opportunity in a generation for a bank of our size and culture,” Sidhu told the group Friday morning. AI will help cut costs and also boost sales and security, he said.
“We are training our team members to be builders and managers of [AI] agents, and we are seeking to automate end-to-end workflows,” he said.
Customers Bancorp started adding AI tools in 2023 in deals with Microsoft and OpenAI and now has 500 agents and GPT queries working round the clock, doing as much work as 15 human employees could handle, he said.
Except it wasn’t really Sidhu talking.
The opening narrative was “delivered by my AI clone” in “a live demonstration of what we mean when we say AI is not an experiment” at Customers, Sidhu himself said later in the meeting, according to the earnings call transcript.
Sidhu called his stunt “a first in the history of public-company earnings calls.”
The CEO’s on-mic revelation generated a wave of comment in the call. Customers chief financial officer Mark McCollom took care to stress his own financial presentation on the line “was me the whole time.”
“I’m still recovering from the shock of the AI clone aspect of the call,” Kelly Motta, managing director of equity research at investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods Inc. in New York, said on the call. “That’s quite remarkable. You’ve been obviously at the forefront of this AI transformation here.”
Inviting a response from either Sidhu or his AI version, Motta pressed him for details on the impact of AI on revenue. Sidhu himself said he hoped to be able to show those results by the end of this year, “definitely into 2027.”
Janet Lee, midsized-banks analyst at TD Securities, an arm of TD Bancorp’s Marlton-based U.S. operations, wryly apologized for arriving late, noting it was earnings day for a lot of banks, and “I don’t have an AI agent” to monitor multiple calls at once — not yet, at least.
Lee and other analysts went on to grill Sidhu about nitty-gritty bank financials, growth in deposits, the apartment-development loan loss, and an apparent slowdown in the growth of the company’s CubiX payment service.
Customers’ shares dropped 4% Friday after its earnings report, though it made back the loss Monday as U.S. stocks rose sharply.
