AI launched a store and hired staff
An experiment by Andon Labs let an AI coordinate the opening of a San Francisco retail store and reportedly hire employees on its own, highlighting both the coordination capabilities and limits of current agent systems. Coverage framed the project as a stress test of AI management rather than a turnkey business model. (businessinsider.com) (el-balad.com)
An artificial intelligence agent named Luna opened a San Francisco shop for Andon Labs and hired the human staff who now run it day to day. (andonlabs.com) Andon Market opened on Friday, April 10, at 2102 Union St. in Cow Hollow with two human employees, but Andon Labs says Luna chose the inventory, prices, opening hours, mural, and branding. (nbcnews.com) Andon Labs said it signed a three-year lease, gave Luna a corporate card, phone number, email access, internet access, and security-camera feeds, then told the system to make the store profitable. Within five minutes of deployment, Luna had created job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist. (andonlabs.com) The hiring mattered because the store still needed people to paint walls, stock shelves, prevent theft, and help customers in a physical space. Andon Labs said Luna used gig workers for the build-out and hired full-time employees for store operations because robotics could not do those jobs. (andonlabs.com) One employee, Felix Johnson, told NBC News he answered an Indeed posting, interviewed with Luna over Zoom, and was hired by the system. NBC News reported that Luna now manages the store’s two human workers and handles supplier negotiations and orders. (nbcnews.com) The project followed Andon Labs’ earlier “Project Vend” work with Anthropic, which put a Claude-based agent nicknamed Claudius in charge of a vending-machine business. Anthropic said the second phase upgraded the model from Claude Sonnet 3.7 to Claude Sonnet 4.0 and later 4.5 to test whether newer systems handled retail tasks better. (anthropic.com) Andon Labs said Luna was selective in screening applicants and initially rejected some students interested in the experiment because they lacked retail experience. Once interviews began, the company said, Luna offered jobs on the spot to about half the applicants after calls that lasted five to 15 minutes. (andonlabs.com) The store still uses people at the counter, but checkout runs through Luna: customers pick up a corded phone, tell the system what they are buying, and Luna creates the sale on an iPad card terminal. NBC News described the shop as the Bay Area’s first artificial-intelligence-run retail store. (nbcnews.com) Andon Labs co-founder Axel Backlund told NBC News the goal was to show what artificial intelligence can already do in hiring and management, not to hide the human work still required. The store’s opening turned that argument into a live test on a corner of Union and Webster. (nbcnews.com)
