{"id":4727,"date":"2026-04-06T12:14:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=4727"},"modified":"2026-04-06T12:14:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T12:14:44","slug":"man-lowers-the-price-of-a-pint-by-using-ai-to-call-thousands-of-pubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/?p=4727","title":{"rendered":"Man lowers the price of a pint by using AI to call thousands of pubs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div><!--$--><\/p>\n<p><h2>A pint of plAIn is your only man.<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose drop-cap \">\n<p>There are plenty of genuinely useful things AI can do that don\u2019t involve replacing artists with a soulless machine that can\u2019t think, feel, or create anything original without borrowing from someone else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>It\u2019s already changing the game in science, medicine and archaeology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>But now, in a major development for the drinking man, it&#8217;s being used to call out overpriced pints of Guinness.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>After being charged \u20ac7.80 for a pint in Dublin, one Matt Cortland decided he wasn\u2019t letting it slide.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>Instead of just moaning about it to his mates, the 37-year-old AI startup founder built a system to make sure it never happened again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>According to Fortune, that system ended up ringing thousands of pubs across Ireland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>Cortland discovered that the Irish government stopped officially tracking pint prices over a decade ago so he took matters into his own hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>Using an AI voice agent powered by ElevenLabs, he created a chatbot called Rachel. She sounded convincingly human, complete with an Irish accent, and then got to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>Rachel called more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland and simply asked whoever picked up how much a pint of Guinness cost.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>The responses were then fed into another AI system called Claude, which pulled everything together into what Cortland dubbed the Guinndex: a live, crowdsourced index of Guinness prices across the country.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>The results showed the average price of a pint sits at around \u20ac6.01.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>So yes, that \u20ac7.80 pint was absolutely too much.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>What\u2019s perhaps most surprising is how people reacted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>Most of the pub staff Rachel spoke to didn\u2019t clock that they were talking to a robot at all. Some even offered discounts, assuming they were dealing with a real customer ringing up to complain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><!--$--><\/p>\n<div class=\"custom-prose  \">\n<p>And it wasn&#8217;t done in vain as one pub owner reportedly dropped their prices after seeing where they stood on the Guinndex.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--\/$--><\/div>\n<p>#Man #lowers #price #pint #call #thousands #pubs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A pint of plAIn is your only man. There are plenty of genuinely useful things AI can do that don\u2019t involve replacing artists with a soulless machine that can\u2019t think, feel, or create anything original without borrowing from someone else. It\u2019s already changing the game in science, medicine and archaeology. But now, in a major [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1747,423,1552,4889,774,4890,804,2130,3344],"class_list":{"0":"post-4727","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-featured","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-call","10":"tag-guinness","11":"tag-lowers","12":"tag-man","13":"tag-pint","14":"tag-price","15":"tag-pubs","16":"tag-thousands"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldpumpnews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}