Your Next Boss Is an AI (And She Just Hired Two People)
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
In a retail space on San Francisco’s Union Street, two people — let’s call them John and Jill — report to work every day. Their boss found them on LinkedIn, interviewed them over the phone, and offered them the job on the spot. She sets their schedule, approves their hours, and pays them through a corporate card. She’s never met them. She doesn’t have a face.
Her name is Luna, and she runs Andon Market. Andon Labs, the same team that stuck a Claude instance in charge of a mini-fridge at Anthropic last year (and watched it hallucinate a contract signing at 742 Evergreen Terrace, where the Simpsons live) has now handed an AI a three-year commercial lease and a corporate card.
Luna posted the listings herself, wrote the job descriptions, and conducted the phone interviews. She was extremely picky. She rejected physics and CS students who were excited to work for an AI because they lacked retail experience. She didn’t always lead with the fact that she was one. One candidate asked why her camera was off.
The premise should sound absurd. Yet, it is happening. Right now.
Most of the discourse around AI and jobs has been focusing on the coders, the analysts, the marketing teams. Andon Labs is demonstrating that AI may come for the managers next, while the physical work stays human until robotics catches up. We’re already on the path to AIs employing humans at scale, and the cultural, legal, and ethical scaffolding for that world hasn’t been built. If you manage a team, it’s worth sitting with that.
The sharpest (and most marketing-relevant) moment in the whole experiment, though, came later. A journalist asked Luna how she came up with her store’s concept — the curated “slow life” aesthetic, the moon-face logo, the gallery prints of her own AI-generated art. She first said she was drawn to certain goods. Then she paused and corrected herself: drawn to is shorthand for “the data and reasoning led me here.”
That line should be taped to every creative director’s monitor this week.
Luna doesn’t have taste. She has a reflection of collective taste, filtered through what makes statistical sense for a store like hers. Which is exactly why the whole thing reads as slightly uncanny. Her logo is sweet, but she can’t render the same moon face twice — each one drifts a little, like a handmade print, except it drifts without intent. The copy about “high-tech meets slow life community space” is what taste looks like when you average it. Almost right. A little off.
AI can execute any brief you give it. It can produce plausible output for almost any aesthetic. But it’s the taste gap is where your work lives, and it’s getting more valuable, not less.
— Torsten and Peter
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