Google AI bot put in charge of Swedish coffee shop, proceeds to order 3,000 rubber gloves, 6,000 napkins, 4 first-aid kits, and constantly screws up the bread order

The Associated Press has a new report on a cafe in Stockholm that's being used for an AI experiment, in which an AI bot using Google Gemini runs the show while all the actual, y'know, coffee-making is done by humans at its command.

The firm behind it, Andon Labs, was previously involved in an experiment where an AI ran a vending machine, and proceeded to start selling stuff at a loss, before inventing fake people and meetings, then collapsing into a bizarre identity crisis. So this should be good.

Andon Labs' bot is an "AI agent" called "Mona" but I am going to just call it the bot. The firm has self-effacingly called the new place Andon Café, and the idea is that the bot oversees all of the management-y side of the business: initially this was stuff like securing the proper permits and hiring staff, but the day-to-day task is ordering appropriate inventory and managing those staff.

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Who, and I might repeat this again later if I feel like it, are the ones right in front of the customers brewing the actual coffee that they order. Right there. Like, a few feet away from you. A human being working in the service industry who wants to take my coffee order in a courteous fashion! Won't someone save me from this hideousness.

Alright. There are obviously good reasons to be doing thi… you know what, I can't finish that sentence. Speak ur brains, AI evangelists:

"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," said Hanna Petersson of Andon Labs.

Petersson says the bot was given some basic prompts: run the place profitably, be nice, and figure out the nuts-and-bolts itself but ask for help when required. It proved efficient at arranging utilities and securing permits, and posting ads on job sites, but when it got down to the nitty-gritty of managing a customer-facing business things started to go a bit pear-shaped.

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(Image credit: via Getty Images/Yuichiro Chino)

First of all, the AI doesn't respect working hours: it uses Slack (an instant messaging platform) to communicate with the baristas, but would "often" message them when they weren't working. This is frowned-upon in most sane countries, but in Sweden? Nej.

The bot arranged commercial contracts with bakeries, but then proceeded to screw these up on the reg: sometimes ordering way too much bread, and then sometimes not putting in an order at all. So… the cafe just had no sandwiches on those days.

It's going great! The bot also managed to order 6,000 napkins, 3,000 rubber gloves, and four first-aid kits for what the AP calls a "tiny cafe" alongside a load of canned tomatoes that aren't used in anything the place actually sells.

Is the AI making money? Nej. A thousand times nej. It has made $5,700 in sales since opening in mid-April, but started with a budget of "$21,000-plus" per Andon Labs.

Chalk another one up to the visionaries of the future. In a previous life I managed a bar, and somehow did the orders, checked the inventory, managed the rotas, and even served some drinks while I was at it. I'm not even saying I was good at it (I was good at it) but my biggest mistake was ordering twenty bottles of Grenadine, and at least you can eventually use that, unlike thousands of rubber gloves.

"When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, [the bot] completely forgets what she has ordered in the past," says Andon Labs' Petersson. Yeah, you can see why that might be an issue. Maybe at some point we'll all wake up and smell the coffee—the coffee that has been made for us by human beings who can handle being told "I'll have a regular latte please."