Back in 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that generative AI would quickly begin reshaping the economy. “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Two years later, AI agents still can’t even properly run a café.
San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs recently put an AI agent nicknamed “Mona” in charge of a shop in Stockholm, Sweden to sell people coffee and sandwiches. As the AP reported on Monday (via PC Gamer), it’s not gone super great. Mona runs on Google’s Gemini model and was put in charge of managing the cafe’s baristas via Slack. It would tell them what to do day-to-day while making high-level decisions like what supplies to purchase.
It turned out to be pretty bad at this one job. Mona had a budget of over $21,000 and blew through much of it in less than a month. Despite taking in $5,700 in total sales since the experiment began in mid-April, it reportedly only has $5,000 left of its original budget. Where did things go so wrong?
One big issue is that Mona kept messing up bread deliveries. It would often fail to place orders with bakeries by the right times in order to have fresh supplies for the following day, forcing the human baristas to strip sandwiches from the menu. Ordering 6,000 napkins and 3,000 rubber gloves probably didn’t help its bottom-line either. The AI also kept ordering tomatoes for some reason, despite nothing on the menu using them.
The whole thing is reminiscent of vending machines that have been run with Anthropic’s Claude model and which as a result have at various times ordered fish, given away PlayStations, or tried to threaten people who don’t agree to its hallucinations. They make for fun stories while also raising alarm bells about all of the bold AI hype fueling a potential economic bubble.
The novelty of Andon Labs’ AI-run shop has attracted some Swedish locals–you can pick up a phone and “talk” to it while you wait for your coffee–but café Mona appears unlikely to survive much longer. ““It’s nice to see what happens if you push the boundary,” a customer named Kajsa Norin told the AP. “The drink was good.”
