A pint of plAIn is your only man.
There are plenty of genuinely useful things AI can do that don’t involve replacing artists with a soulless machine that can’t think, feel, or create anything original without borrowing from someone else.
It’s already changing the game in science, medicine and archaeology.
But now, in a major development for the drinking man, it’s being used to call out overpriced pints of Guinness.
After being charged €7.80 for a pint in Dublin, one Matt Cortland decided he wasn’t letting it slide.
Instead of just moaning about it to his mates, the 37-year-old AI startup founder built a system to make sure it never happened again.
According to Fortune, that system ended up ringing thousands of pubs across Ireland.
Cortland discovered that the Irish government stopped officially tracking pint prices over a decade ago so he took matters into his own hands.
Using an AI voice agent powered by ElevenLabs, he created a chatbot called Rachel. She sounded convincingly human, complete with an Irish accent, and then got to work.
Rachel called more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland and simply asked whoever picked up how much a pint of Guinness cost.
The responses were then fed into another AI system called Claude, which pulled everything together into what Cortland dubbed the Guinndex: a live, crowdsourced index of Guinness prices across the country.
The results showed the average price of a pint sits at around €6.01.
So yes, that €7.80 pint was absolutely too much.
What’s perhaps most surprising is how people reacted.
Most of the pub staff Rachel spoke to didn’t clock that they were talking to a robot at all. Some even offered discounts, assuming they were dealing with a real customer ringing up to complain.
And it wasn’t done in vain as one pub owner reportedly dropped their prices after seeing where they stood on the Guinndex.
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