'Never send a human to do a machine's job,' says Agent Smith in the 1990s classic The Matrix. Well, if Anthropic's experiment with a simple office store and one of its AI models is anything to go by, Smith has definitely got that all back to front.
The artificial intelligence company, founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021, has detailed its retail industry trial in a surprisingly open blog. I'll let the opening paragraph set the scene: "We let Claude manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy."
