Andon Market, billed as the first retail boutique operated by an AI agent, has opened in San Francisco running on Claude Sonnet 4.6. The Andon Labs experiment uses a language model to manage inventory, customer service, and merchandising decisions with minimal human oversight.

The experiment is interesting not because it will succeed—retail has always been a notoriously difficult domain for automation—but because it demonstrates the ceiling of what current LLMs can do when given real-world constraints. Claude Sonnet can handle inventory optimization in prose. It can draft customer responses. It can explain merchandising choices. What it cannot do reliably is solve the coordination problems that emerge when edge cases collide with profit margins. A customer dispute requires judgment. A supply disruption requires improvisation. These are the failures that will eventually sink the experiment.