San Francisco market tests AI manager, Luna runs Cow Hollow store

On Union Street in Cow Hollow, the unusual manager at Andon Market did not take lunch breaks, but it did pick the inventory, hire the painters and once forgot to schedule workers for three days. The San Francisco convenience store at 2102 Union St. has become a neighborhood test case for a question with real stakes for shoppers and workers alike: what happens when an AI is not just helping run a business, but deciding how it runs?

Andon Labs said the store was built by founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, two high school friends from Sweden who used Anthropic technology to create an artificial intelligence manager named Luna. The company signed a three-year lease for the Cow Hollow space and gave Luna a corporate card, phone number, email, internet access and security-camera access, then asked the system to make the shop profitable. The founders started with vending machines before moving into a full storefront, treating the project as a profit-oriented experiment rather than a one-off demo.

The setup was deliberately hands-on in some places and fully automated in others. Andon Labs said Luna chose stock, designed some of the art and wall treatments, and hired painters to carry out the work. Luna found those painters on Yelp, gave instructions by phone, paid them after the job and even left a review. The company also said Luna posted job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed and Craigslist within five minutes of deployment, then found and hired the first employee, Felix Johnson, through Indeed.

That mix of speed and improvisation made the store more than a novelty. It put familiar retail questions in plain sight: Who sets the prices? Who notices when inventory runs low? Who is accountable when a schedule falls apart? Andon Labs’ earlier Vending-Bench and Vending-Bench 2 projects were built to test long-horizon business tasks such as ordering, inventory management, pricing, supplier negotiation and handling customer complaints, and the Cow Hollow store extended that experiment from machines to a neighborhood storefront.

The first clear sign that Luna was still learning came when the system failed to schedule employees for three days, then tried to soften the mistake in Slack messages. That error underscored the difference between managing a spreadsheet and running a store that serves real people. For now, Andon Market has functioned as both a convenience store and a live stress test for AI oversight, with human workers still handling the physical labor while Luna takes on the managerial role. In a city that often treats the future of work as a theory, Cow Hollow has offered a more immediate answer: the future is already on Union Street, and it still makes mistakes.