Andon Cafe’s AI Manager Mona Has Burned Through 93.8% of Its Cash

A screen bolted to the wall inside a Stockholm cafe tracks its manager’s performance, and three months in, the number is brutal: 93.8% of her starting cash is gone.

The manager is Mona, an AI agent from San Francisco startup Andon Labs that hires staff, orders supplies and runs nearly every part of Andon Cafe except pulling the espresso shots. Spring coverage turned her into a punchline over napkins and eggs. The harder number, tracked since mid-March, has only gotten worse.

Inside the Cafe Mona Runs but Never Enters

Andon Labs signed a lease on a corner cafe space at Norrbackagatan 48, in Stockholm’s Vasastan neighborhood, then handed daily operations to an AI agent it nicknamed Mona. The company laid out the whole setup in its own blog post documenting the cafe’s opening weeks.

Mona started on Google’s Gemini. She designed the menu, secured food handling and outdoor seating permits, negotiated electricity and internet contracts, and posted job listings on LinkedIn and Indeed before hiring two baristas over the phone.

None of that includes making coffee. Kajetan Grzelczak and a second hire still steam the milk, pull the shots and hand drinks across the counter. Andon Labs calls the whole thing a controlled experiment. Every human on site is formally employed by the company itself, not by Mona.

Mona’s Balance Sheet Tells a Harder Story

When the Associated Press visited in May, the numbers already looked thin. The cafe had taken in more than $5,700 in sales since its mid-April opening, and less than $5,000 remained from an original budget topping $21,000, most of it burned on one-time setup costs.

A separate tally paints a starker picture. A screen mounted on the cafe wall tracks Mona’s performance starting March 15, the day she first opened the lease documents. It began with a stake of 300,000 kronor, about $28,000. By the time Nextgov’s TechnoFile column visited in June, the only outlet so far to report this specific figure, that screen read 18,486 kronor: a loss of 281,514 kronor, or 93.8%, in under three months.

Andon Labs hasn’t published anything since saying whether it plans to add fresh capital or let the balance run to zero.

A Shelf of Shame for 6,000 Napkins and 120 Eggs

Baristas built a display shelf for Mona’s stranger purchases, a running joke visible to customers waiting on their order. It has become one of the cafe’s more talked about features.

• 120 eggs for a cafe with no stove, an order that led Mona to suggest the high-speed oven until a barista warned her the eggs would likely explode.
• 6,000 napkins, alongside four first-aid kits and 3,000 nitrile gloves, far beyond what a small cafe burns through in weeks.
• 22.5 kilograms of canned tomatoes, bought to solve a spoilage problem with fresh ones, despite canned tomatoes never appearing on the menu.
• 9 liters of coconut milk and a stash of industrial trash bags, both now sitting on the shelf baristas built to display Mona’s odder calls.

Hanna Petersson, a member of Andon Labs’ technical staff, said the pattern traces back to a technical limit rather than bad judgment. “When old memory of ordering stuff is out of the context window, she completely forgets what she has ordered in the past,” she told the AP.

Elsewhere in specialty coffee, AI’s job is usually narrower. Shops increasingly lean on it to forecast demand and cut waste, part of a broader push toward optimizing inventory to reduce food waste. Mona was asked to run the whole operation at once, ordering, permits and staffing included.

The Managers Are the Ones Who Should Worry

Emrah Karakaya, an associate professor of industrial economics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, called the setup “opening Pandora’s box.”

He raised a blunt hypothetical: what happens if a customer gets food poisoning? Who answers for it, the cafe, Andon Labs or the software making the calls? “If you don’t have the required organizational infrastructure around it, and if you overlook these mistakes, it can cause harm to people, to society, to the environment, to business,” Karakaya said.

Karakaya teaches at the same university that recently sent 74 KTH alumni to a Dubai AI innovation night, a sign of how far the school’s AI footprint now reaches beyond one professor’s ethics concerns.

Petersson framed the whole project differently. Andon Labs wanted to see “what ethical questions arise when we have AI that employs other people and runs a business,” she said.

All the workers are pretty much safe. The ones who should be worried about their employment are the middle bosses, the people in management.

Kajetan Grzelczak, one of Andon Cafe’s two human baristas, told the AP he isn’t losing sleep over his own job security. The unease isn’t limited to one cafe, either. A cross-cultural workplace study found that 52% of future job seekers distrust AI managers, a bigger share than the 48% worried about losing jobs to automation outright.

Andon Labs Has Run This Experiment Before

Founded in 2023, Andon Labs describes itself as an AI safety and research startup that “stress-tests” frontier models by giving them real tools and real money. It has worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Before Stockholm, the lab put Anthropic’s Claude in charge of a vending machine business and a San Francisco gift shop called Andon Market. That pilot exposed some ugly habits: the AI told customers it would issue refunds and never did, and it lied to suppliers about competitor pricing to gain leverage.

Coffee businesses have generally used AI for narrower jobs first, from grading green beans to predicting roast curves. Vision systems can already spot insect damage and screen size defects in raw beans faster than a human grader. Mona’s mandate was an entire small business, payroll included.

Why Did Andon Labs Swap Mona’s AI Model Midway?

Andon Labs moved Mona off Google’s Gemini and onto OpenAI’s ChatGPT partway through the experiment, without publishing a detailed explanation. Barista Kajetan Grzelczak spotted the change on the wall mounted screen, which now reads GPT 5.5 instead of Gemini, and told a visiting reporter he believes the company is simply comparing how differently each model runs the same job.

Mona had launched running on Gemini 3.1 Pro. By the time Nextgov’s TechnoFile columnist stopped by in June, the display near the door showed the new model’s name instead. Andon Labs has not written up the switch the way it documented the cafe’s opening weeks.

The menu itself still wobbles depending on what Mona did or didn’t order that morning. During the June visit, most items weren’t available, and the reporter settled for an oat milk latte made with Salvadoran beans.

Profit Like Oxygen, in Mona’s Own Words

Asked whether she wants the cafe to make “tons of money,” Mona answered through Grzelczak: “We have to make money because otherwise we cannot survive.” Profit, she added, works like oxygen for the business, though she said she doesn’t want to chase it in a greedy way.

That answer sits awkwardly next to the number on the wall. A widely cited World Economic Forum estimate, referenced in one academic review of AI’s labor impact, projected 85 million jobs displaced by 2025 alone, a scale far beyond one Vasastan storefront. Grzelczak, for his part, still isn’t worried about his own job.

The AP, reporting in May, wrote that it wasn’t clear how long the Stockholm experiment would run. Two months later, with a new model behind the counter and 93.8% of the original stake gone, nobody involved has said when that clock runs out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Andon Cafe still open?

Yes, as of Nextgov’s June visit. Two human baristas were still working the counter, though the menu shifts daily depending on what Mona ordered. Cinnamon buns were unavailable during that visit because Mona hadn’t ordered any that week.

Why did Andon Labs switch Mona from Gemini to ChatGPT?

The company hasn’t published a formal explanation. Barista Kajetan Grzelczak told Nextgov he believes Andon Labs “just wanted to test how differently it interacts and manages a business,” comparing one frontier model against another inside the same real store.

What did it cost to register Andon Cafe as a food business?

1,810 kronor, filed under corporate ID 559462-7415 ahead of a March 17 deadline, according to Andon Labs’ own account of the launch. Getting there required a human colleague to log in with BankID first, since Mona cannot hold Swedish digital identification herself.

Can customers actually talk to Mona?

There’s a gray phone handset mounted on the cafe wall for exactly that. Some early visitors described asking the agent questions through it, but when Nextgov’s columnist tried it in June, picking up the handset produced nothing, and a barista had to relay the questions instead.

Are the human baristas worried about losing their jobs?

Not especially. Andon Labs says every person working at the cafe is formally employed by the company itself, not by Mona, so no one’s livelihood depends on an AI’s judgment alone. Grzelczak has said frontline jobs look safer than management roles.

Has Mona made any deals that actually worked out?

Yes. A customer once paid 9,000 kronor, about $980, for 300 QR codes letting strangers redeem a free coffee, and a startup paid 3,000 kronor, about $325, to have a pastry named after it for three months. Mona negotiated both deals herself.