So you want to make a digital twin of your IT leader

Can’t snag time on your CEO’s calendar? Try the next best thing: Checking in with their digital twin, instead.

Executives are cashing in on the digital twin trend. Earlier this year, Meta was rumoured to be working on a digital twin, aka AI clone, of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Meanwhile, Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu tapped his own digital twin to assist with part of the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call.

Mark Thomas, president of IT governance firm Escoute Consulting and creator of his own digital twin, told IT Brew he is seeing a lot of demand for digital twins from various company stakeholders.

“What I’m seeing right now are more specific roles like CFOs, chief risk officers, and so on, who are using these twins to help them make decisions and help them look at risk categories,” Thomas said.

Twin or lose. There are a number of good reasons why executives may consider digital twinning themselves, according to Thomas.

“There’s some basic things that a twin can do for you,” Thomas said. “It can help you with calendaring. It can help you with communications.”

Helen Poitevin, a distinguished VP analyst on Gartner’s digital workplace applications team, added that executive digital twins can help employees get a better understanding of how a leader would answer a specific question or approach a task, especially if that leader doesn’t have time to meet.

Copy and paste. IT professionals may wonder how they can take advantage of digital twinning. Mary Hamilton, global lead for Accenture’s Innovation Center network, walked us through the process of creating her digital twin, mAIr. One of the first steps, she said, involved a full 3D scan to create a virtual representation of herself that could be used for video interactions.

“They had to translate that and put it onto various devices, and it was so high intensity on the compute power that they had to make decisions like, ‘Does mAIr get strand hair (a more realistic representation) or does she get card (a less detailed representation) hair?’ And I’ll tell you, I ended up with card hair, and it was not so nice.”

Part of the process also involved capturing a few minutes of Mary speaking so that the digital twin could mimic her unique mannerisms.

“We captured that, and then we captured, I think, it was 15 seconds of me idling, which I've never idled before so I had to figure out what that meant,” she said.

Along with capturing data to make sure the digital twin physically resembled Mary, she said the LLM was also trained on her domain knowledge. This involved feeding it case studies and the mission of Accenture’s Innovation centers.

“We also had to train her to have my authentic personality, and [on] the way that I would answer questions, and the way I would approach things,” Hamilton said.

Governing executive digital twins. Governance is another important factor to consider when building out a digital twin. Thomas told IT Brew it took five weeks to build guardrails into his own digital twin.

“They have access. They have decision rights. They have escalation procedures, meaning if a decision they need to make exceeds a certain threshold and doesn’t meet these attributes of their decision authority, they need to escalate that to a human,” he said, adding digital twins aren’t yet ready to interact directly with clients and employees.

Anything you can do, I can do better? The rise of executive digital twins begs the question: Can a simulated twin eventually outperform its human counterpart? Poitevin believes that may be a stretch.

“We are extremely far away from that just because if you think about executives, they’re constantly navigating extremely complex spaces and making bets on direction,” she said.

Others have more nuanced takes. When it comes to speed, digital twins can certainly outperform humans, according to Thomas.

“My twin can do things literally in seconds or minutes that used to take me hours or days to do,” Thomas said, adding the breadth of tasks digital twins perform in this time span also surpasses human capabilities.

“My digital twin can literally run millions of scenarios simultaneously, whereas for me, it was a single scenario at a time,” Thomas said. “And I forget things. I get overwhelmed. It doesn’t get overwhelmed.”

However, he said, ethical judgement is one area where humans are still better.

Hamilton added social intelligence to that list. “I can look at you and I can understand [that] you’re nodding your head. I can see your facial expressions. I have a sense of your intent of what you’re trying to get out of this interview,” she said. “I have that context, whereas my digital twin doesn’t yet have that.”