Matt Cortland used AI voice cloning to call every pub in Ireland and ask about Guinness prices. His AI agent “Rachel” made more than 3,000 calls to create the “Guinndex,” a real-time price tracker for pints across the country.
Cortland paid €7.80 for a Guinness in Dublin and wondered about average pricing nationwide. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office stopped tracking beer prices in 2011, so he built his own system. He used ElevenLabs to create an AI voice with a Northern Irish accent that could make conversational phone calls to bartenders.
The AI collected pricing data from thousands of pubs, then Anthropic’s Claude processed the information into a searchable index. Pubs can now see competitor pricing and adjust accordingly. Some are already lowering prices to stay competitive on the platform.
I’m not sure how legal it would be to robocall every bar in New York, but in Dublin the economic impact was immediate. Pubs have price transparency they’ve never had before. Customers can find the cheapest pint in their area. Market forces that were previously invisible are now completely exposed through a simple AI phone system.
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Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.