What started as a modest experiment at Anthropic’s San Francisco office has become one of the more striking demonstrations of autonomous AI in the real world. Andon Labs installed an AI-operated vending machine at the AI safety company’s headquarters roughly a year ago, with a simple premise: let an AI agent run a business entirely on its own, with no human input.
“Six months later, it was doing so well that it started to become a bit boring,” co-founder Lukas Petersson told Fortune at the COO Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz. “And now, one year later, it’s just like, I don’t actually think humans can do much better.”
Petersson told Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller that AI agents are now running real businesses—hiring staff, managing supply chains, and passing government labor inspections—without a single human decision-maker. And his advice to every major company: build a shadow copy of yourself and find out how close replacement really is.
From snacks to full operations
The vending machine quickly proved too small a stage. Andon Labs scaled up, deploying AI agents to run full retail stores and cafés under the same premise: no human decision-makers.
