Meet Rachel: the AI agent that phoned 3,000 pubs to price a pint

Over Paddy's weekend 2026, a friendly Northern Irish "woman" called Rachel rang more than 3,000 pubs across all 32 counties to find out the price of a pint of Guinness. Over 1,000 gave a price. Only a handful seemed to realise Rachel was an AI voice agent. A data gap 14 years in the making Ireland’s Central Statistics Office stopped tracking pint prices 14 years ago, leaving no comprehensive dataset since. In response, Matt Cortland created the “Guinndex,” using AI to rapidly collect and…