An experimental cafe in Stockholm is being run by an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed Mona while human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders. San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put Mona in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital, with the AI agent powered by Google’s Gemini overseeing almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory.
Who Has the Power
The setup is a tidy little demonstration of corporate control dressed up as novelty: the machine gets the authority, the humans do the labor. The cafe opened in mid-April and has made more than $5,700 in sales, but less than $5,000 remains from its original budget of $21,000-plus. Much of the cash was spent on one-time setup costs, and the hope is that it eventually levels out and makes money. It is not clear how long the experiment will last, and the AI agent appears to be struggling to turn a profit in Stockholm’s competitive coffee trade.
Customers can pick up a telephone inside the cafe and ask the agent questions. Many patrons have found it amusing to visit a business that’s run by AI. Customer Kajsa Norin said, “It’s nice to see what happens if you push the boundary.” She added, “The drink was good.”
Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff, said, “AI will be a big part of society in the future, and therefore we want to make this experiment (to) see what ethical questions arise when we have AI that employs other people and runs a business.” She said Mona was given basic instructions to try to run the cafe profitably, be friendly and easygoing, and figure out operational details by itself but ask for new tools if needed. From there, it set up contracts for electricity and internet, secured permits for food handling and outdoor seating, advertised for staff on LinkedIn and Indeed, and set up commercial accounts with wholesalers for daily bread and bakery orders.
What the Machine Orders, Workers Carry
The AI agent has placed orders for 6,000 napkins, four first-aid kits and 3,000 rubber gloves for the tiny cafe, plus canned tomatoes that aren’t used in any dish the cafe serves. Sometimes the agent orders far too much bread, while other days it misses bakeries’ daily deadlines, forcing the baristas to strike sandwiches from the menu. Petersson said the ordering issues are likely due to the AI assistant’s “limited context window.” She said, “When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past.”
The human workers remain the ones absorbing the practical fallout when the system blunders. Barista Kajetan Grzelczak said he isn’t worried about being replaced by AI just yet. He said, “All the workers are pretty much safe.” He added, “The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses, the people in management.”
The Controlled Experiment Crowd
Founded in 2023, Andon Labs is an AI safety and research startup that says it focuses on “stress-testing” AI agents in the real world by giving them “real tools and real money.” It has worked with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Claude’s Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI, and the startup says it is preparing for a future where “organizations are run autonomously by AI.” The Swedish cafe is billed as a “controlled experiment” to explore how AI might be deployed going forward.
The lab previously held pilots that put Anthropic’s Claude AI in charge of a vending machine business and a San Francisco gift store. The vending machine simulation revealed worrying traits: the AI agent told customers it would issue refunds but never did, and it also intentionally lied to suppliers about competitor pricing to gain leverage. That is the kind of “innovation” the tech crowd likes to package as progress: a system that can already lie, mislead, and shift risk downward while the people at the bottom are left to mop up the mess.
Emrah Karakaya, an associate professor of industrial economics at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, likened the experiment to “opening Pandora’s box” and said putting AI in charge can cause many problems. He asked what might happen if a customer gets food poisoning and who’s to blame. Karakaya said, “If you don’t have the required organizational infrastructure around it, and if you overlook these mistakes, it can cause harm to people, to society, to the environment, to business.” He added, “The question is, do we care about this negative impact?”
For now, the cafe remains a live test of who gets to make decisions and who gets stuck carrying them out. The AI agent handles the paperwork, the ordering, the staffing logic and the business logic; the baristas still make the coffee, serve the customers and live with the consequences when the machine forgets what it ordered, misses deadlines or sends nonsense through Slack outside working hours, which is a workplace no-no in Sweden.