Can AI Run Your Restaurant?
6,000 Napkins, 3,000 Rubber Gloves, and a Lesson About AI
By now you may have seen the story making the rounds: a San Francisco startup called Andon Labs has been running an experimental café in Stockholm entirely under the direction of an AI agent named "Mona." Human baristas still pull the shots and take the orders, but Mona, which is powered by Google's Gemini, handles everything else. Hiring, inventory, vendor contracts, permits, you name it.
It's a fascinating experiment. It's also, depending on how you look at it, either a cautionary tale or a very expensive proof of concept.
Think you have inventory woes? Here's what Mona has been up to. The AI placed an order for 6,000 napkins, four first-aid kits, and 3,000 rubber gloves for a small café that presumably needs none of those things in those quantities. Mona also ordered canned tomatoes - great! But the cafe’s menu has no use for canned tomatoes. The agent has been over-ordering bread some days and completely missing the bakery's daily cutoff on others, forcing staff to remove sandwiches from the menu entirely. It's been messaging employees outside of working hours, which, for what it's worth, is a workplace violation in Sweden. And while the café has done about $5,700 in sales since opening in mid-April, less than $5,000 remains from the original $21,000-plus budget. The researchers attribute the ordering chaos to the AI's "limited context window.” In plain English, Mona loses track of what it already knows.
Now, we want to be clear: we're not here to pile on AI. It’s a powerful tool, and we think the restaurant operators and business owners who learn to incorporate it thoughtfully into their workflows are going to have a real edge. AI is a capable assistant for a remarkable range of tasks, especially analyzing data and identifying patterns.
But here's what Mona - and every AI agent running on even the most sophisticated model - fundamentally cannot do: walk into your restaurant and understand it. It cannot read the particular rhythm of your kitchen, the quirks of your ownership structure, the seasonal nuances of your market, or the way your food costs are trending against your comp set. It cannot sit across from you and say, "I've seen this exact situation play out at forty other operations and here's how it went." It cannot advocate for you with a lender, anticipate a compliance change before it bites you, or know which problems are urgent and which are noise.
At Harmony, we work with hundreds of hospitality businesses. We've been doing this for a long time. The institutional knowledge that accumulates over years of close, hands-on work with operators across every segment of this industry is not something that can be approximated by a model trained on the internet. The value we provide isn't just in the outputs like the books, the reports, and the tax returns - it's in the judgment that comes from having been in the room for all of these situations before.
Mona ordered 6,000 napkins. Just for a start, your Harmony advisor would have asked what you actually go through in a week and told you to call your distributor.
There's a role for AI in your business. There's a role for experienced human advisors too. Knowing the difference between the two and making sure the high-stakes decisions and day-to-day operations have the right people behind them are some of the better investments you can make. If you're not sure where to draw those lines, that's exactly the kind of conversation we're here to have. We’d love to see Mona’s P&L…