Have you ever overpaid for a beer? Matt Cortland has, and it set him on a path to never repeat the mistake.<\/p>\n
That is, for Cortland\u2019s drink of choice: a pint of Guinness. After paying \u20ac7.80 (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. <\/p>\n
To his astonishment, the country\u2019s Central Statistics Office had dropped price tracking of the nation\u2019s most popular beer in 2011. That led Cortland to the wild idea of tracking the price himself.<\/p>\n
Cortland\u2014founder of an AI startup\u2014turned 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like, \u2018Well can I just call every pub in Ireland and conversationally ask them with AI?,\u2019\u201d Cortland told Fortune. \u201cI pulled the thread, and I just kept pulling the thread, and here we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using the data accrued from the thousands of phone calls, he then turned to Anthropic\u2019s Claude to devise the \u201cGuinndex<\/a>,\u201d which he calls a \u201cliving, breathing\u201d consumer price index for a pint of Guinness across Ireland. It also allows bartenders and beer drinkers to contribute and modify prices.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now Cortland can see how his \u20ac7.80 pint weeks earlier matches up with the rest of Ireland. On Monday, the average price was about \u20ac6.01 (about $6.88) and the most common price was \u20ac5.50 ($6.30). \u00a0<\/p>\n Guinness parent company Diageo<\/a> didn\u2019t respond to Fortune\u2019s requests for comment. Beer prices are independently set by pub owners across Ireland.<\/p>\n AI models are advancing at an increasingly rapid pace, surpassing benchmarks even the most sophisticated scientists deemed out of the realm of the machine. And while many shudder at the idea of an AI job apocalypse<\/a>, others are leveraging the technology to answer complex questions. Some have even used it to sell their home<\/a>. <\/p>\n And while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google<\/a> president Ruth Porat think the technology will solve the world\u2019s most complex issues like finding a cure for cancer<\/a>, AI is also solving smaller, albeit still important, problems along the way.<\/p>\n Humanlike voice AI<\/p>\n