You’re thinking of replacing a vending machine with a chatbot which indeed doesn’t make much sense. The experiment was replacing the management of the machine. It’s not crazy to think that, money being no object, it would be great to have a person who hangs around the machine, whose job it is to ask customers what kinds of things people might want to buy from the machine, and conduct trials, tinker with pricing, do promotional deals, etc. But that’s of course impractical to have a FTE per machine to do that. The idea of this experiment was to see if that could be done with Claude. And of course as others have pointed out, it’s a simple and cheap and low-stakes version of “a business” suitable for experimenting with.