How a man lowered the price of Guinness by using artificial intelligence to call 3,000 pubs
There are some really good uses for AI outside of the weird fascination of replacing artists with a machine that can’t feel or think on its own or be creative without wholesale stealing from someone else. AI will and is already revolutionizing scientific, medical and archaeological research. Perhaps even better, one guy used artificial intelligence to definitively determine that he was overcharged for a pint of Guinness in Dublin.
After paying €7.80 for a pint, Matt Cortland created a system to ensure it never happened again. According to Assetsthat system ended up ringing thousands of pubs across Ireland.
Cortland, a 37-year-old AI startup founder, found that Ireland’s government had stopped officially tracking pint prices more than a decade ago. Using an AI voice agent built on ElevenLab’s AI voice generator system, he created an AI agent named Rachel, a machine that sounded convincingly human, with a Northern Irish accent. Rachel then independently called more than 3,000 pubs across Ireland to ask whoever answered what the price of a pint of Guinness was.
This guy created an AI voice that called 3,000 pubs to track Guinness prices
The answers were fed to Claude to create what Cortland ingeniously called the “Guinndex”, a living, crowdsourced index of Guinness awards across Ireland. The results show an average price of around €6.01.
That means Cortland Guinness was absolutely overpriced, and now he had the cold, hard data to back it up. Assuming the data is correct, given that there’s a very good reason every AI chatbot service has a legal disclaimer on it reminding its users that it can go wrong. There’s also the matter of Rachel herself, who the first Fortune article says was created as a “tribute” to a real woman, Rachel Duffy, the winner of the British version of The traitors. This BBC article seems to clear up some confusion I had about whether he was training an AI to clone a real person’s voice without her consent. It seems he didn’t, and instead used Rachel Duffy’s voice more as an inspiration than a one-on-one AI ripoff.
That said, Cortland found that most people Rachel talked to didn’t seem to mind or even noticed that they were chatting with a robot disguised as a human. Some of them even offered discounts to what they assumed was just another human customer calling to complain.
The whole project seems to have had a practical impact on the real world. A pub owner allegedly lowered the prices after seeing their listing on Guinndex. Cortland says he wants to apply the same technology and methodology to all other consumer products to keep prices in check.
