At This Cafe, the Staff Is Human but the Boss Is AI

Article By Newser

Stockholm’s Andon Cafe opened in April, is doing so-so

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. 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 $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, reports the AP.

Mona got to work after it was prompted with some basic instructions, said Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff. The team told it 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, and secured permits for food handling and outdoor seating. The agent then advertised for staff on LinkedIn and Indeed, and set up commercial accounts with wholesalers for daily bread and bakery orders.

It communicates with the baristas via Slack, often messaging them outside of working hours, which is a workplace no-no in Sweden. Other problems have arisen, particularly related to inventory. 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. And then there’s the bread.

Sometimes the agent orders far too much, 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.” “When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past,” Petersson said.

Many cafe patrons have found it amusing to visit a business that’s run by AI. Emrah Karakaya, an associate professor of industrial economics at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, took a different view. He likened the experiment to “opening Pandora’s box” and said putting AI in charge can cause many problems. What might happen, he said, if a customer gets food poisoning? Who’s to blame?

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