"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.'"
"Using the data accrued from the thousands of phone calls, he then turned to Anthropic's Claude to devise the 'Guinndex,' which he calls a 'living, breathing' consumer price index for a pint of Guinness across Ireland."
"Now Cortland can see how his €7.80 pint weeks earlier matches up with the rest of Ireland. On Monday, the average price was about €6.01 and the most common price was €5.50."
After overpaying for a pint of Guinness in Dublin, Matt Cortland sought to track average prices across Ireland. Discovering that the Central Statistics Office had stopped tracking this data, he developed an AI voice agent named Rachel to call pubs and gather pricing information. With over 3,000 calls made, he created the 'Guinndex,' a consumer price index for Guinness that allows contributions from bartenders and drinkers. The average price of a pint was found to be €6.01, with the most common price at €5.50.
Read at Fortune
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