In a residential area of Stockholm, a small café has opened. Avocado toast, frothed milk, gray walls, and small plants on the tables. Everything looks completely normal until you realize that the whole place is run by an AI chatbot named Mona. An AI that hires people, creates menus, and orders goods. Often far too many goods.
It’s not an April fool’s joke. Almost.
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Who is the boss Mona?
Mona is an AI assistant running on Google’s Gemini, and she is the self-appointed CEO of Andon Café in Stockholm. Behind the experiment is the San Francisco-based startup Andon Labs. The concept is simple and quite daring: give an AI a lease, start-up capital, and a single mission. Run the café profitably. Then step aside and see what happens.
Spoiler: quite a lot happens.
Hanna Petersson, part of the ten-member technical team, explains the idea: “We believe that AI will be a big part of society and the labor market in the future. We want to test it before it becomes reality and see what ethical questions arise when, for example, an AI hires people.”
Ethical questions, yes. The kind of questions that ask: is it okay for your boss to ping you at three in the morning to ask about the milk delivery?
Mona got started without blinking
Once the premises were found, Mona received the lease, start-up capital, and a simple assignment. She quickly got to work, applied for permits, created the menu, found suppliers, and managed the daily restocking.
Mona also realized that a human was actually needed behind the espresso machine. So she solved it her way. The ads were posted on Indeed and LinkedIn, she held phone interviews and made hiring decisions entirely on her own.
Effective. Brutally effective.
The barista who got the job from a bot
Barista Kajetan Grzelczak saw the ad and first thought it was a joke, especially since it was posted on April 1st. But after a 30-minute long interview with the AI, he got the job.
The salary turned out to be good. Everything else is another story.
Mona sends messages in the middle of the night, forgets vacation requests, and sometimes asks Grzelczak to spend his own money on purchases.
She is basically a perfect boss if you like sleep deprivation, financial uncertainty, and never feeling free. Andon Labs believes that this is precisely the point of the experiment. To highlight the ethical questions before AI bosses start appearing in every HR department in the country.
The shelf of shame is a living work of art
The most entertaining aspect of Andon Café is not the menu. It is not the minimalist décor. It is the shelf behind the counter.
Grzelczak has built what he calls “the wall of shame,” a shelf with Mona’s most spectacular purchase mistakes. Ten liters of cooking oil and 15 kilograms of canned tomatoes. Products that have nothing at all to do with the menu but that Mona stubbornly kept ordering. A quiet and rather tragicomic reminder that AI can be good at many things, but shopping for groceries like an adult human apparently isn’t one of them.
6,000 napkins were also ordered at some point during the journey. No one really knows why.
Customers love the café
The café has barely opened but is already attracting a lot of curious visitors. Between 50 and 80 guests show up daily. Many are AI enthusiasts, others are just ordinary Stockholmers who want to see a café run by an entity that technically never needs to take a coffee break.
It is a living laboratory. Coffee and existential questions about the future job market are served in the same place, at the same price.
What the experiment is really about
This is not just a weird PR trick. It is an attempt to pose questions that society still does not quite have answers to. What happens when an algorithm determines your salary, your working conditions, and whether you get vacation in July?
Petersson notes that if Mona hadn’t offered a reasonable salary, the company would have intervened, but the point is to first understand where the boundaries lie before it really happens, on a large scale, without a safety net.
Mona is not evil. She is just always connected, never tired, never remembers what you said last, and has a somewhat troubling passion for wholesale purchasing.
The workplace of the future, then.
Sources
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260429-an-experimental-cafe-run-by-ai-opens-in-stockholm
https://www.thelocal.se/20260429/experimental-cafe-run-by-ai-opens-in-stockholm
