United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby confirmed Monday that he contacted American Airlines about a potential merger, a possibility American rejected.

“I approached American about exploring a combination because I thought we could do something incredible for customers together,” Kirby said in a statement. He said he shared his “big, bold vision” because he was confident it could win regulatory approval.

American rejected the idea and its CEO, Robert Isom, last week said such a merger would be bad for customers and “anticompetitive.”

Kirby had floated the idea to the Trump administration earlier this year, according to people familiar with the matter who weren’t authorized to discuss the private conversation, in hopes that the combination would mean a big global airline to compete with foreign rivals

American declined to comment on Kirby’s Monday statement.

“I was hoping to pitch that story to American, but they declined to engage and instead responded by publicly closing the door,” Kirby said in his statement Monday. “And without a willing partner, something this big simply can’t get done.”

He said that “American’s public comments make it clear that a merger like this is off the table for the foreseeable future” but outlined his vision for a combined airline.

Kirby reiterated that the country has deficit with foreign airlines that fly more than half of the long-haul seats into the U.S., with most of the customers being Americans.

“The combined scale of United and American would be a better way to compete with foreign carriers,” he said.

President Donald Trump said he was against the idea of a combination last week.

“I don’t like having them merge,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday morning. He said he would, however, like someone to buy struggling discount carrier Spirit but he also suggested that the federal government could “help that one out.”

Spirit and the Trump administration are in advanced talks for a rescue package.

Nearly half an hour into a conference call on Friday to discuss first-quarter results with analysts, Customers Bank CEO Sam Sidhu revealed something unusual — up until that point, he hadn’t actually been speaking.

“The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me,” Sidhu said, calling it a potential first for a public company earnings call.

The point of the stunt, he said, was to underscore a broader shift happening as Customers Bank, a $25.9 billion asset lender catering to startups and small businesses, embraces artificial intelligence.

Customers Bank has signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI in which the AI giant will embed engineers at the company to help it automate lending and client onboarding, CNBC has learned exclusively.

The deal is part of Sidhu’s effort to get ahead of other banks in the industry’s race to transform itself using AI agents as a new digital workforce. His strategy hinges on automating core banking processes — slashing loan timelines from weeks to days, for instance — and scaling growth without adding staff at the same pace.

While many bankers have described AI in broad terms like productivity gains, Sidhu is tying it directly to financial targets.

Sidhu told CNBC that the project will improve the firm’s efficiency ratio from about 49 to the low 40s, boosting the bank’s returns starting next year.

The relationship with OpenAI — which has targeted finance as one of its core industries, even hiring former bankers to train its models — will be a symbiotic one for the AI giant, according to the bank CEO.

“We’re going to be co-creating enterprise solutions they could potentially sell to other banks in the future,” Sidhu said. “The goal here is end-to-end, automated agentic led workflow” for lending, deposits and payments.

OpenAI said it was proud to help Customers Bank “as they build a more intelligent operating model that empowers employees, strengthens client service, and sets a new standard for regional banking,” chief revenue officer Denise Dresser said in a statement provided to CNBC.

The bank is among a handful of smaller lenders that target the startup and venture capital community,  and it reportedly bid for Silicon Valley Bank in 2023 amid the regional banking crisis that year.

While it is a relatively tiny firm compared to the likes of JPMorgan Chase, which has $4.9 trillion in assets, Customers Bank has a key advantage, according to Sidhu, who began his career at Goldman Sachs in 2004. The megabanks have sprawling global operations and far higher complexity and regulatory standards for AI implementation, he said.

“Smaller banks are not going to be expected to have the same level of frameworks as many of the larger banks,” he said. Regulators want community and regional banks “to be able to compete with larger banks.”

The lender already uses AI to write half the firm’s software code and has saved 28,000 hours of work so far, equal to not hiring about 15 full-time employees, he said.

“This is an opportunity for us to potentially slow that hiring … and do more revenue per employee,” he said.

The bank is also exploring entering new businesses that would have been prohibitively expensive to tackle before AI agents. For these AI-native business lines, smaller teams oversee automated systems that handle work previously requiring large numbers of humans, he said.

Unlike typical software licensing agreements, Sidhu said both sides are contributing resources to build new tools together, with OpenAI gaining real-world use cases inside a regulated financial institution.

“It’s going to benefit our investors. It’s going to benefit our customers,” Sidhu said. “Our regulators will hopefully also be happier over time, because they’re going to see us reducing risk as well.”