Have you ever overpaid for a beer? Matt Cortland has, and it set him on a path to never repeat the mistake. That is, for Cortland’s drink of choice: a pint of Guinness. After paying €7.80 (about $8.93) for Irish dry stout at a pub in Dublin earlier this month, the 37-year-old grew curious about the average cost of a pint across Ireland. To his astonishment, the country’s Central Statistics Office had dropped price tracking of the nation’s most popular beer in 2011. That led Cortland to the wild idea of tracking the price himself. Cortland—founder of an AI startup—turned to AI to lend him a hand, and a voice. He devised Rachel with AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs. Made as an homage to Rachel Duffy, the winner of the U.K. version of the reality TV show The Traitors and equipped with a Northern Irish accent, the voice-enabled AI agent made more than 3,000 calls across the island, inquiring about the price of a pint of Guinness. “I was like, ‘Well can I just call every pub in Ireland and conversationally ask them with AI?,’” Cortland told Fortune. “I pulled the thread, and I just kept pulling the thread, and here we are.” Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/30/guinness-beer-prices-ireland-anthropic-claude-ai/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence