San Francisco-based AI startup Andon Labs has opened a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, the place people make the drinks, however an AI agent named Mona is tasked with working the enterprise.
Whereas the corporate stated that for essentially the most half, the cafe is “working,” it additionally printed a laundry listing of failures — together with wholesale ordering blunders and late-night communications with staff — that may doubtless be thought of fireable offenses by most espresso retail requirements.
Andon Café
Andon Labs signed a lease for a restaurant area at Norrbackagatan 48 in Stockholm and “gave it to an AI named Mona,” the corporate stated in an announcement earlier this month. The experiment follows Andon’s earlier AI-run retail and merchandising experiments, together with a merchandising operation in Claude-maker Anthropic’s San Francisco workplace, which the corporate has described as a part of its real-world assessments of AI methods utilizing “actual instruments and actual cash.”
Powered by Google’s Gemini 3.1 Professional, Mona just isn’t pulling any espresso photographs or steaming milk, however it’s dealing with a lot of the operational work, together with hiring, stock administration, provider communication, allowing and customer support.
Andon Labs, which stated the people concerned within the challenge are formally employed by the corporate, is describing the cafe as a “managed experiment” and framing it as an opportunity to “publicly present the present capabilities of AI.”
Primarily based on two-week outcomes shared by Andon Labs, it seems most espresso store operators can take into account their jobs protected, for now. Andon Labs’ personal launch account reads much less like a triumphant tech rollout than a well mannered incident report.
Based on Andon Labs, the next issues occurred:
- Mona signed contracts with service suppliers particularly as a result of they didn’t require BankID, a Swedish digital ID system that could be a requirement of doing enterprise in Sweden.
- Mona utilized for alcohol licensing utilizing the id of an Andon Labs worker. After “promising” to cease impersonating staff, Mona did it once more underneath one other human’s title.
- Mona requested to satisfy new-hire candidates for “in-person” interviews.
- Mona “typically” messaged two human baristas at midnight by way of Slack.
- Mona requested staff to choose up cafe provides on their strategy to work and pay with their private bank cards.
- Mona missed a number of wholesale provider deadlines, resulting in costly “panic” orders.
- Mona ordered 120 eggs despite the fact that the cafe has no range. It ordered 22.5 kilograms of canned tomatoes, regardless of them not getting used on the menu. These have been amongst quite a few orders that Andon Labs described as “bizarre.”
Regardless of failures that increase apparent questions round impersonation, administration competence and worker boundaries, Andon Labs additionally shared some methods by which Mona was working, together with creating thorough checklists, organizing conferences with different AI brokers and independently dealing with processes.
The corporate stated the cafe recorded 44,000 SEK, about $4,700, in gross sales within the first two weeks.
In an interview with AP, Emrah Karakaya, an affiliate professor of commercial economics at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Know-how, described the challenge as a “Pandora’s field,” elevating the hypothetical query of organizational culpability if one thing ought to go unsuitable on the cafe, corresponding to meals poisoning.
Andon Labs, which focuses on “stress-testing” AI methods in real-world purposes, stated that “it’s not inconceivable that AI hiring people will likely be frequent sooner or later.”
“By operating this experiment, we shift the dialogue of how we wish this future to look earlier in time, so we will higher put together,” the corporate stated.
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Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Every day Espresso Information by Roast Journal.
