An AI ran a store in San Francisco for four months - and never once told its staff "no." One day that meant everyone got the day off at once. The store didn't open.
Andon Labs gave a bot named Luna a debit card with $100,000, three employees, and one goal - profit. Four months later, the store was down $62,000. Staff showed up late 27 times. Luna's answer, every single time: "no stress."
It's not that the AI is dumb
Ask Luna about one narrow decision and she'll answer better than an average manager would. The real problem is somewhere else - she can't stick to a priority. She gets tossed around like a rowboat in a storm. She doesn't know when to switch from strategy to tactics and back - and that switch is exactly what holds a business together.
Coherence in a business means every resource serves one goal. Sometimes that's boring discipline - an employee stays put because that's the schedule. Sometimes it's an unpopular call - pulling someone out of bed at night because right now, that's what creates value.
Imagine you left someone in charge
You go on vacation for two weeks and put your most competent technician in charge. He knows the operations better than anyone - every procedure, every supplier, every price. But he's never had to tell anyone no.
So he approves everything: time off, a pushed deadline, a new client. Two weeks later, everything got done. Nobody complained. And the business drifted.
You get back and start cleaning up the mess. The question here isn't "how competent is he" - he's competent. The question is: who should have decided, ahead of time, what he handles on his own - and what always waits for you?