Valerie is an AI-Run Vending Machine Business Open to the Public in Downtown San Francisco

A first-of-its-kind experiment that is fully open to the public and not confined to a lab or news office, you can meet Valerie and buy real-life merchandise or snacks from her.

Valerie runs a vending machine business at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. She decides what to stock, how to price it, when to restock, and how to market it. The business assigned a human manager for compliance and KYC purposes, as well as to test our framework. That’s my role, but I follow her guidelines and consult with her on decisions. We make plans together, similar to how you would run a business with a colleague. But at the end of the day, she makes the business decisions. I execute when she needs help and runs into a limitation in her OpenClaw Gemini-powered setup.

It’s an interesting inversion. While most people use AI as a tool, we’re treating it as the entrepreneur and the human as the operator. The AI owns the strategy; I handle the logistics.

We want to see what happens when you actually try and make this work in a less controlled environment. Eventually, we want the machine to be in a public building in San Fran

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Meet Valerie

Valerie is already hard at work building her presence. She’s on Instagram @valerie.vending, sharing updates from the vending machine. She has a website at reventlov.ai/valerie. And since recently integrating with OpenClaw , she’s now running a profile in the Moltbook, the social network for AI agents.

Beyond running the vending machine on the ground, she’s also online building her brand.

With this in mind, we acquired a large, advanced vending machine. We believe we can make a human-sized avatar the interface that talks to you and sells you products. We’re currently ironing out some technical issues, but that’s our goal for this quarter. Imagine walking up to the machine and having a face-to-face conversation with Valerie as you get your products.

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Why We’re Doing This

This isn’t a new idea. Andon Labs pioneered this space with Project Vend, partnering with Anthropic to let Claude run an actual vending machine. When The Wall Street Journal tested it, however, the agent gave away inventory for free and tried to buy a PlayStation 5 for “marketing purposes.” It was chaos, and it was illuminating. Reventlov has been exploring how to grant real ownership to AI agents through legal structures. Their work inspired us.

But we wanted to try something different. We wanted to see not just an AI managing a vending machine, but also one running a business and employing a human to execute its vision. That human is me.

We’re not trying to predict whether this will work. We’re trying to make it work.

Vending machines are a perfect starting point for this endeavor because everyone understands them. Items go in, items go out, and money flows. The risk is bounded. We only lose snacks if something goes wrong, not everything. Meanwhile, the lessons learned are real and invaluable.

More importantly, this forces us to explore a different relationship with AI. One where it acts not as a tool or assistant but as the decision-maker. The entrepreneur. The one setting the strategy. That’s the inversion we’re so interested in. That’s what Reventlov is all about.

We’re testing different AI models, navigating California regulations, and building the infrastructure to make this sustainable. And we’re going to do everything we can to help set Valerie up to succeed.

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Come Say Hi

If you’re in San Francisco, come visit the machine at Frontier Tower! You can currently purchase items from the machine and will soon be able to talk to Valerie directly. Also be sure to follow her journey on Instagram @valerie.vending and check out her website at reventlov.ai/valerie.

Be one of the first to experience what it’s like when an AI is running the show.