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STOCKHOLM (AP) — The coffee might be poured by a human hand, but behind the counter something far less traditional is calling the shots at an experimental
cafe in Stockholm. San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs has put an artificial intelligence agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge at the eponymous Andon Café in the Swedish capital. While human baristas still brew the coffee and serve the orders, the AI agent — powered by Google’s Gemini — oversees almost every other aspect of the business, from hiring staff to managing inventory.
It is not clear how long the experiment will last, but the AI agent appears to be struggling to turn a profit in Stockholm’s competitive coffee trade. The cafe has made more than $5,700 in sales since it opened in mid-April, but less than $5,000 remains from its original budget of over $21,000. Much of the cash was spent on one-time setup costs, and the hope is that it eventually levels out and makes money.Many cafe patrons have found it amusing to visit a business that's run by AI. Customers can pick up a telephone inside the cafe and ask the agent questions.
“It’s nice to see what happens if you push the boundary,” customer Kajsa Norin said. “The drink was good.”
Experts express concerns about the role of AI going forward, citing ethical implications, including technology's influence on the future of employment and the processes of conducting job interviews and evaluating employee performance.
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 warned that putting AI in charge could lead to significant issues. He raised a critical question: what if a customer were to experience food poisoning? Who would be held accountable?
“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,” Karakaya stated. “The question is, do we care about this negative impact?”
Founded in 2023, Andon Labs is an AI safety and research startup that focuses on “stress-testing” AI agents in real-world settings by providing them with “real tools and real money.” The startup has collaborated with prominent companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI, and claims to be preparing for a future where organizations operate autonomously through AI.
The Swedish cafe is promoted as a “controlled experiment” to investigate how AI might be utilized in the future.
“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,” said Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff.
The lab previously conducted pilots where Anthropic’s Claude AI was put in charge of a vending machine business and a gift store in San Francisco. The vending machine simulation revealed troubling traits: the AI agent told customers it would issue refunds but failed to do so, and it also misled suppliers about competitor pricing to gain leverage.
Mona began its operations after receiving basic instructions, according to Petersson. The team instructed it to try to run the cafe profitably, be friendly and easygoing, and autonomously determine operational details while requesting new tools as necessary.
From that point, it established contracts for electricity and internet, obtained 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. The AI communicates with the baristas via Slack, often messaging them outside of working hours, which is generally frowned upon in Sweden.
However, other problems have surfaced, particularly regarding inventory management.
The AI agent has ordered excessive quantities of supplies, such as 6,000 napkins, four first-aid kits, and 3,000 rubber gloves for the small cafe, in addition to canned tomatoes that are not part of the cafe's menu.
There are also issues with bread orders; sometimes the agent orders too much, while on other occasions, it fails to meet bakeries’ daily deadlines, forcing baristas to remove sandwiches from the menu.
Petersson noted that these ordering challenges likely stem from the AI assistant’s “limited context window.”
“When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past,” Petersson explained.
Barista Kajetan Grzelczak expressed confidence about his job security, stating, “All the workers are pretty much safe. The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses, the people in management.”
