{"id":1651852,"date":"2026-05-28T15:02:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T19:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1651852"},"modified":"2026-05-28T15:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T19:06:10","slug":"andon-labs-ai-agent-managing-brick-and-mortar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2026\/05\/andon-labs-ai-agent-managing-brick-and-mortar\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Luna, an A.I. Agent Managing a Brick-and-Mortar Store, and the Humans Behind Her"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Founders Axel Backlund (left) and Lukas Petersson are using retail not for profit but as a stress test for autonomous A.I. managers. Courtesy Andon Labs<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At first glance, Andon Market could pass for any typical neighborhood shop in San Francisco\u2019s trendy Cow Hollow district. Inside are artisan snacks, handmade candles and a selection of curated books, including Nick Bostrom\u2019s Superintelligence<\/em> and Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World.<\/em> But the most unusual thing about the shop isn\u2019t what it sells. It\u2019s who is managing it. <\/span>The storefront is a public experiment engineered by Axel Backlund and Lukas Petersson, the co-founders of San Francisco-based Andon Labs. The Y Combinator-backed A.I. startup recently signed a three-year, $7,500-a-month lease and handed $100,000 and a corporate credit card to an A.I. agent named Luna. Their directive to her: run a brick-and-mortar retail business,<\/a> including<\/span> its two human employees.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe are quite sure that A.I. will have the capabilities to be managers,\u201d Backlund told Observer. Rather than chasing retail margins, Backlund and Petersson are using the newly launched storefront to stress\u2011test what Luna, powered by Anthropic’s Claude model, can and cannot handle in the real world, then using that knowledge to improve benchmarks for today\u2019s A.I. systems.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe think there is a lack of measuring A.I.,\u201d Backlund said, adding that they hope to spark a bigger discussion about the technology\u2019s capabilities, ideally before autonomous agents take over more roles in the workforce.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Petersson put it more broadly: \u201cOur vision is to automate everything<\/a>, every part of the organization,\u201d he said on the <\/span>Cognitive Revolution<\/span> podcast. \u201cThe parts where it does not work, that is fine. That provides information on how far away we are from this future where it is completely end-to-end.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Native to Sweden, Backlund and Petersson met as high school classmates and became close friends before attending different universities. They continued working together on projects and hackathons, and eventually decided they wanted to start a company together. After studying machine learning and reading more about A.I. safety, they became convinced that \u201cthe best thing we could do with our skills was to start a company addressing the risks and highlighting the capabilities of A.I.,\u201d Backlund said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their backgrounds reflect that mix of research and applied engineering. Before launching Andon Labs in late 2023, Petersson studied A.I. at Switzerland\u2019s ETH Z\u00fcrich and logged stints at Google and Disney Research. Backlund, who studied at Sweden\u2019s KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Switzerland\u2019s EPFL, worked as a data engineer at McKinsey\u2019s A.I. arm<\/a> before joining Andon Labs in 2024.<\/span><\/p>\n

That same year, the duo introduced a paper for NeurIPS, a top academic A.I. conference. Their research showed how OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o could autonomously generate deepfake audio, among other findings. The results, they argued, showed that agentic A.I. capabilities are rapidly outpacing today\u2019s safety benchmarks.<\/p>\n

For Andon Labs, safety isn\u2019t about stopping A.I. from taking human jobs, but staging real-world experiments to see what agentic systems can actually do and where they fall short. \u201cIt is not because we want to expand to chain A.I.-run retail stores<\/a> across the world,\u201d the founders wrote in a blog post last month. \u201cWe\u2019re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we\u2019d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an A.I. can responsibly hold.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"People