An AI Cafe Operator is Messaging Baristas at Midnight and Making ‘Weird’ Purchasing Orders

San Francisco-based AI startup Andon Labs has opened a cafe in Stockholm, Sweden, where humans make the drinks, but an AI agent named Mona is tasked with operating the business. 

While the company said that for the most part, the cafe is “working,” it also published a laundry list of failures — including wholesale ordering blunders and late-night communications with employees — that would likely be considered fireable offenses by most coffee retail standards.

Andon Café

Andon Labs signed a lease for a cafe space at Norrbackagatan 48 in Stockholm and “gave it to an AI named Mona,” the company said in an announcement earlier this month. The experiment follows Andon’s earlier AI-run retail and vending experiments, including a vending operation in Claude-maker Anthropic’s San Francisco office, which the company has described as part of its real-world tests of AI systems using “real tools and real money.”

Powered by Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, Mona is not pulling any espresso shots or steaming milk, but it is handling much of the operational work, including hiring, inventory management, supplier communication, permitting and customer service.

Andon Labs, which said the humans involved in the project are formally employed by the company, is describing the cafe as a “controlled experiment” and framing it as a chance to “publicly show the current capabilities of AI.”

Based on two-week results shared by Andon Labs, it appears most coffee shop operators can consider their jobs safe, for now. Andon Labs’ own launch account reads less like a triumphant tech rollout than a polite incident report. 

According to Andon Labs, the following things happened:

• Mona signed contracts with service providers specifically because they did not require BankID, a Swedish digital ID system that is a requirement of doing business in Sweden.
• Mona applied for alcohol licensing using the identity of an Andon Labs employee. After “promising” to stop impersonating employees, Mona did it again under another human’s name.
• Mona asked to meet new-hire candidates for “in-person” interviews.
• Mona “often” messaged two human baristas at midnight through Slack. 
• Mona asked employees to pick up cafe supplies on their way to work and pay with their personal credit cards.
• Mona missed multiple wholesale supplier deadlines, leading to expensive “panic” orders.
• Mona ordered 120 eggs even though the cafe has no stove. It ordered 22.5 kilograms of canned tomatoes, despite them not being used on the menu. These were among numerous orders that Andon Labs described as “weird.”

Despite failures that raise obvious questions around impersonation, management competence and employee boundaries, Andon Labs also shared some ways in which Mona was working, including creating thorough checklists, organizing meetings with other AI agents and independently handling processes.

The company said the cafe recorded 44,000 SEK, about $4,700, in sales in the first two weeks.

In an interview with AP, Emrah Karakaya, an associate professor of industrial economics at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, described the project as a “Pandora’s box,” raising the hypothetical question of organizational culpability if something should go wrong at the cafe, such as food poisoning.

Andon Labs, which focuses on “stress-testing” AI systems in real-world applications, said that “it’s not impossible that AI hiring humans will be common in the future.”

“By running this experiment, we shift the discussion of how we want this future to look earlier in time, so we can better prepare,” the company said.

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