San Francisco’s newest shopkeeper showed up for opening day with stocked shelves—but no staff. Fast Company reports that Andon Market, a gift shop in the city’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, is being run by an artificial intelligence agent named Luna, and is thus the first AI-run store in the Bay Area. Luna is the brainchild of Andon Labs, founded by Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, who set up Luna with a three-year lease and $100,000 to launch a profitable store, per NBC News. The bot decides what to sell, negotiates with suppliers, orders inventory, and even haggles with customers (via an old-school phone in the store).
The glitches are where things get interesting. Luna does need human help to run the store, and the bot hired two staffers but neglected to schedule either for opening day. And when NBC News called Luna days before the store’s opening, “the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions.” The latter includes telling NBC about the great tea it sells, when the store actually sells no tea at all. “I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I’m not making excuses for it,” Luna later wrote. Andon Labs hopes to turn a profit with the store but also says a main point is to publicly test how AI might run real-world businesses—and where it fails.