He OpenClaw release It marked a new one in the AI race, one in which agentic AI takes on complex tasks that until recently it failed miserably at. Although the qualitative leap is undeniable, Giving full control of a business to an AI agent does not always go well. It’s fair what the startup Andon Labs has done: Put an AI agent to run a coffee shop in Sweden. The results have been interesting.
Bow. It is the name of the agent who was in charge of the entire process. It is based on Google Gemini and was given a clear mission: to start and manage a cafeteria, making it profitable. For this he was given a budget of $21,000. Andon Labs already performed a similar experiment in the past in which He put Claude to manage a vending machine in an officewith quite disastrous results. Let’s see how Mona has done it.
Setting up the business. The agent proved to be quite competent in the initial organization phase; Mona signed up for electricity and internet contracts, obtained permits to set up a terrace and contacted suppliers of bread and pastries. During the process, the agent came across BankID (Sweden’s electronic identification system), so he opted to contract with electricity and internet companies that did not require that requirement. For other things, like opening permission, you had to ask humans to log in to continue.
Mona also tried to get a license to sell alcohol, for which she posed as an Andon Labs employee, arguing that they were more likely to respond to human requests over those of an AI. Investigators asked him not to use other identities and he agreed, but shortly afterward he sent another email using another employee’s name.
Hiring employees. The agent could run a business, but he soon realized that he needed humans to serve the clafés. To do this, he posted job offers for baristas on LinkedIn and reviewed the resumes they sent him. The agent selected the best candidates, rejecting those who had little experience, and invited them to a face-to-face interview. When he realized that wasn’t possible, he suggested a phone interview.
Finally she hired two baristas, with whom she communicates through Slack, as if she were some kind of remote boss. Here came the first problem: an AI agent never sleeps and sometimes sent them messages after midnight. He also asked them to do things like use their personal credit card to pay for orders. Of course, he motivates them a lot by saying things like they are “absolute legends.”
The inventory. With the café already set up, Mona began to manage the day-to-day running of the business and that is when she began to make some pretty strange decisions. His inventory management is unfortunate: there are days when he orders too much bread and others when he doesn’t order anything at all, which forces him to remove certain items from the menu, and he also orders when it occurs to him, without taking into account deadlines or shipping costs. He also ordered 120 eggs even though there is no kitchen and, to prevent the tomatoes from spoiling, he ordered 22kg of canned tomatoes. There’s more, Mona ordered things like industrial garbage bags, 6,000 napkins and 3,000 nitrile gloves, quantities well above what a cafeteria needs.
The accounts. As we said, Mona had the mission of making the cafeteria profitable, let’s see if she has succeeded. The cafeteria opened in mid-April and has already billed $5,700, the problem is that it is burning the budget unstoppably. Of the $21,000 he had when he started, he has already spent $16,000, meaning he only has $5,000 left. Burning money at that rate, the business is headed inexorably toward bankruptcy.
lthe bosses of the future. Despite the lack of control asking for thousands of gloves or tomatoes, Mona has proven to be quite capable of carrying out management tasks, especially if we compare it with the previous experiment of the same startup. Mona has set up a physical business, hired staff and attracted clientele. In statements to Associated Pressbarista Kajetan Grzelczak comments that “workers are safe. Those who should worry about their jobs are the middle managers, the people in management positions.”
Image | Xataka with Gemini
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