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An AI agent was given free rein to run a coffee shop in Sweden, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect.
Dubbed “Mona,” the Google Gemini-powered agent was given a $21,000 budget in an experiment conducted by the AI safety startup Andon Labs. It was empowered to do everything from hire staff to place orders for goods to maintain its inventory. Humans, meanwhile, did the actual work of catering, receiving their AI overlord’s commands through the workplace messaging platform Slack.
But since launching in mid-April, the Stockholm café has brought in only $5,700 in sales, while burning through over $16,000 from its original budget, the Associated Press reports.
Some of its questionable business decisions include ordering thousands of rubber gloves, despite the café only having a handful of employees. The AI’s handlers, nonetheless, are holding out hope that this is just a blip from expensive setup costs. How well it performs will raise grander questions of the tech’s impact on the workforce.
“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,” Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff, told the AP.
To launch the experiment, Mona was given a simple set of instructions. It should run a profitable café, be friendly and easygoing, and try figure out operational details by itself, Petersson said.
In many ways, it proved admirably competent. It set up electricity and internet, placed LinkedIn hiring ads, and secured permits for outdoor seating. It also set up commercial accounts with wholesalers for bread and pastries, per the reporting.
But it was in the day-to-day operations that Mona failed to display adequate business acumen. On some days, it’d order too much bread, and on others it failed to order the bread in time, forcing the baristas to slash sandwiches from the menu.
The Gemini agent also ordered 3,000 rubber gloves, four first-aid kits, and 6,000 napkins for the café — along with canned tomatoes, which aren’t used in any of the dishes on its menu. Petersson speculated that these issues were due to the AI’s “limited context window.”
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