Run a company autonomously
Andon Labs on why they built Pion, an agent designed to run any company on its own.
Done with a custom-built or unnamed agent
- What they did
- Andon Labs built Pion to run its real businesses: vending machines, a retail store in SF, a cafe in Stockholm and radio stations. Persistent agents get email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments. Pion is now open as a research preview, and people with a business or idea can join a waitlist. Andon says it relies on automated monitoring to catch unwanted behavior.
- How it went
- Early agents made costly mistakes, and by late 2025 frontier models ran a vending machine profitably. The store and cafe lost money early and are still unprofitable, though they have improved with newer models.
- Worth knowing
- The store and cafe lost a lot of money early, partly from rent and the salaries of the humans they hired. Expect incidents, since Andon says unchecked agents risk them.
Try it yourself with Manus
I want to test how far an AI agent can run a small business: [describe business, e.g. an online store for X]. Draft an operating plan covering sourcing, pricing, customer messages, and daily tasks, and list what you can do on your own versus what needs my approval. Do not spend money, publish anything, or contact anyone until you've shown me the exact action and I've approved it.
Discussion on HN · Sep 14, 2026
Five of these in your inbox every morning
The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.
More like this
- GitHub Copilot
Run a solo company with eight agent departments
A founder set up CEO, CFO, COO, lawyer, accountant, marketing, CTO, and improver agents that share memory and consult each other.
Revise courses from student evaluation feedback
A professor had Claude Code summarize course-evaluation PDFs, filed themes as GitHub issues, and used agents to revise his security course and two others.
Reconcile bank statements with invoices
Cowork cleaned vendor names, categorized expenses, matched invoices to transactions, flagged missing ones, built an Excel file and renamed invoice files.
Turn Notion PRDs into scoped Linear tickets
Devin's docs describe reading a Notion PRD to create Linear tickets, producing implementation plans for a backlog, and posting customer health summaries to Slack.
- Custom agent
Contact job candidates for initial HR screening
A job seeker reports an AI agent calling and emailing them for a first HR screening.
Learn personal scripts from a tools folder
Claude Cowork read a folder of personal scripts for email, CRM, research and drafting, added them to memory, and carried the capabilities to a new interface.