Source: The New York Times
Andon Labs deployed Claude Sonnet to autonomously manage inventory, pricing, and customer interactions at a physical boutique—moving AI retail experimentation from chatbots and recommendation engines into actual P&L accountability. The experiment matters because it establishes the first concrete test case for whether language models can handle the temporal, spatial, and financial constraints of real commerce without human intervention. If this works at scale, it validates a new tier of AI labor that retail chains could deploy to reduce overhead on underperforming locations or test new product categories with minimal human risk.