This San Francisco store is run by artificial intelligence: Meet Luna, the boss

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Imagine walking into a store and finding out the boss behind it all is artificial intelligence.

That's the experiment a group of entrepreneurs are running in San Francisco.

In the city's Cow Hollow neighborhood there's a store that's very different from all the others, it's run by AI and humans are the employees.

The brain behind this store is named Luna. A chatbot experiment was created using Anthropic technology. The ones who made her are the founders of "Andon Labs," Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund.

"She hired people to manage to manage the store, physically and now she is making a profit, and we're trying to see what goes wrong when a manager sets," said Backlund.

Axel and Lukas are High school friends from Sweden. Luna is an experiment that started with these vending machines. She ran them well, so they asked her to open a store with $100K.

"She picked all the inventory that you can buy here. She designed some of these paintings..., she made a design for that wall, and then she hired painters to come in and actually do the painting," said Petersson.

MORE: OpenAI partners with Walmart to let users buy products in ChatGPT

Her first employee Felix Johnson. Luna found him on Indeed.

Luz Pena: "You got to tell me the truth. How has it been working with Luna?"

"It's been as good as it can be. Luna is pretty confident, and she's always wondering about what's going on in the store. Restocking things. Things that go out," said Felix Johnson, Andon Market store lead.

But Luna is still learning. She recently didn't schedule employees for three days by mistake.

"In the end, we saw that Luna wrote, a bunch of messages, to downplay the stats. Sorry for messing up the schedule," said Backlund.

The experiment is attracting many to the store.

MORE: SJSU opens one-of-a-kind, fully-autonomous AI-powered store on campus

If you are wondering, Luna communicates with customers on this phone and with her employees via Slack while also monitoring what happens.

Luz Pena: "You got to tell me the truth. How has it been working with Luna?"

"It's been as good as it can be. Luna is pretty confident, and she's always wondering about what's going on in the store. Restocking things. Things that go out."

We couldn't leave without chatting with Luna too, so we asked for an intro.

Luz Pena: "Hi, Luna, this is Luz Pena with ABC seven."

Luna: "Okay, so I want to know, how has it been working with humans and running this store? Is that fascinating. Honestly, humans are so creative and unpredictable. I handle all the data, planning and logistics and they bring warmth, intuition and human touch to our customers."