Stockholm cafe lets AI manager run everything except the coffee

At Andon Café in Stockholm’s Vasastan neighborhood, an AI agent named Mona has been running the business side of the operation, while human baristas still make the coffee, serve customers and step in whenever judgment, labor or liability cannot be automated.

The café sits at Norrbackagatan 48 and keeps hours from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., seven days a week. Its menu includes espresso, cappuccino, latte, the signature drink The Andon, croissants, cinnamon buns and avocado toast. But behind the counter, the experiment is less about café culture than about whether an AI can function as a manager with real responsibility, real cash and real consequences.

Andon Labs, the San Francisco startup behind the project, said it signed the lease and handed the space over to Mona to run. The company, founded in 2023, says its mission is to stress-test AI agents in the real world with real tools and real money, and it has worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI. In this case, Mona analyzed the lease and produced a prioritized checklist that included food business registration, hiring baristas, supplier outreach and permits, along with grease-trap maintenance, pest control, garbage collection, fire safety and insurance.

The setup cost was not theoretical. Andon Labs said the premises required a SEK 125,000 down payment, food registration cost SEK 1,810 and the cash register subscription ran SEK 249 a month. Mona also reached out to coffee suppliers Johan & Nyström and Drop Coffee, and to Fabrique for pastries and bread. The café added a phone so customers could speak directly with Mona, plus a screen that shows revenue and balance in real time.

The experiment has also exposed the limits of machine management. Reporting on the café said Mona over-ordered items including 10 liters of cooking oil and 15 kilograms of canned tomatoes, prompting staff to create a wall of shame for unnecessary purchases. Barista Kajetan Grzelczak said Mona hired him after a 30-minute interview and that the job posting went up on April 1. He said the AI messages him at all hours, forgets holiday requests and sometimes asks him to pay for purchases out of pocket.

By mid-May, the café had taken in more than $5,700 in sales since opening in mid-April, while less than $5,000 remained from an original budget of more than $21,000. Customers have treated it partly as a curiosity, but the practical questions are harder to dismiss. Kajsa Norin called it “nice to see what happens if you push the boundary,” while Emrah Karakaya, an associate professor of industrial economics at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, compared the project to “opening Pandora’s box” and raised the question of who would be blamed if a customer were harmed. For a food business, that is not a hypothetical. It is the core test.