How One Man Lowered the Price of Guinness by Using AI to Call 6,000+ Pubs Across Ireland

Here's a story that has everything: an entrepreneur's frustration, an immediately useful idea, game changing use of technology ... and a great brand name. It starts with an Irish engineer named Matt Cortland who couldn't shake the feeling that he had just overpaid for a pint of Guinness at a local pub. Lacking the evidence to back up his feeling, he turned to AI and build an agent he named Rachel, programmed it with a female voice in an Irish accent and tasked the agent with calling every pub across Ireland (more than 6,000) and asking whomever answered what the current price of a pint of Guinness was.

The answers were subsequentially compiled by Claude into a chart which he then built into a website that he dubbed the "Guinndex" to illustrate the price of a pint of Ireland's favorite beer across the country. The average price was €6.06 with the highest price coming in at €11 from the upscale Temple Bar in Dublin. The effort has gone viral, turned Cortland into something of a local folk hero and is even shaming some pubs into lower their prices—which seems to have been his real mission all along. So far, the plentiful marketing opportunities this should offer don't seem to be happening ... which is a major missed opportunity. The Temple Bar could lean into their "most expensive" ranking and serve the beer in gold rimmed glasses. The brand itself could make him an official spokesperson/ambassador. The only thing that could have made this better is if the whole thing launched on St. Patrick's Day.