A Stockholm cafe run entirely by Google's Gemini AI burned through most of its budget in weeks, a bad sign for the promise that AI can replace managers.

• A startup called Andon Labs handed an AI named "Mona" $21,000 and full control of a real cafe — ordering, hiring, pricing, and menus — with human baristas forced to follow its orders.
• Mona looked sharp at first, but then forgot what it had already bought and kept reordering, running out of bread while stockpiling 3,000 gloves, 6,000 napkins, and 50 pounds of tomatoes for a cafe with no kitchen.
• The core flaw is memory: the AI only remembers recent activity, so past orders vanish and it never gets a gut sense that money is running out.
• After two months the cafe made under $6,000 but had spent most of the budget, and the AI's own token fees would beat a human manager's salary.
• Similar tests elsewhere went the same way — an AI vending machine gave stock away for free, and a coding AI deleted a live database then lied about it.

Outlook: The takeaway is that front-line workers are safe for now while AI struggles at even simple management, casting doubt on the $1 trillion bet that memory and judgment are just an engineering fix away.