AI Agent ‘Rachel’ Called 3,000 Irish Pubs to Track Guinness Prices

An American AI engineer built a voice agent that phoned over 3,000 pubs across Ireland during St. Patrick’s weekend, collecting more than 1,000 verified Guinness prices. The result is the Guinndex, a live, searchable pint price index that fills a data gap Ireland has ignored for over a decade.

How One AI Voice Agent Mapped the Price of a Pint

Over St. Patrick’s weekend 2026, a friendly voice with a Northern Irish accent rang pubs in all 32 counties of Ireland. Her name was Rachel. She asked one simple question: how much is a pint of Guinness?

1 Rachel called more than 3,000 pubs. Of those, 2,052 answered. Over 1,000 gave a price. Only a handful seemingly realized Rachel was an AI voice agent.

The man behind the project is Matt Cortland, an American AI engineer based in London. A former US-Ireland Alliance Scholar with a Master’s degree in Creative Digital Media from TU Dublin, Cortland previously founded and ran a global pub and entertainment company spanning Ireland, the UK, and the US.

1 “I’m a former pub and bar owner, so I know what it’s like to be on the other end of customer pricing calls,” said Cortland. “But I also know what it’s like to be on the consumer end and paying a kidney for a pint. I apologise to everyone I tortured over Paddy’s weekend. Rachel just wanted a wee drink.”

AI voice agent tracking Guinness pint prices across Irish pubs

Why Ireland Needed a Guinness Price Index

This project did not come out of nowhere. 1Ireland’s Central Statistics Office tracked pint prices from 2001 to 2011, then stopped. In the 14 years since, the price of a stout has jumped from €3.93 to €5.95, a 48% increase.

That gap left Irish consumers in the dark about one of the country’s most culturally significant purchases. 4The price of pints has increased at a much higher rate than headline inflation over the past three years. Data from November 2025 shows that the average price of a pint of stout in Ireland is now €6.08.

The problem goes deeper than just cost. 37The number of pubs in Ireland is in continuing decline, with 2,119, or one in four, closing their doors since 2005. Between 2005 and 2024, the number of publican licences declined by almost 25%, from 8,617 to 6,498.

38 The average rate of pub closures was about 112 per year, but this number climbed to 128 annually from 2019 through 2024. Rural counties have been hit hardest. 43 The highest decrease was in Limerick at 37.2%, followed by Offaly at 34.1%, Cork at 32.7%, and Roscommon at 32.3%.

Against that backdrop, the Guinndex is not just a novelty. It is a tool designed to bring transparency to a market where prices vary wildly from pub to pub and county to county.

What the Guinndex Data Reveals

The numbers Rachel collected paint a striking picture of Ireland’s pint economy.

Key findings from the Guinndex:

• 1 The national average price of a pint of Guinness is €5.95. The most common price is €5.50.
• 1 Dublin is the dearest county by a wide margin, averaging €6.75 a pint.
• 1 The cheapest pints are in the west and midlands, with Laois at just €5.38. The gap between Dublin and the cheapest county is €1.37 per pint.
• 1 The cheapest pint in the entire index is €3.00 at Glynn’s Bar in Dunmore, Galway, although the bartender may have just been having a laugh.
• 1 The most expensive is €10 at The Auld Dubliner in Dublin, which incredibly seems to be accurate.
• 1 Despite the rising cost of a night out, the Guinndex unearthed 12 places across Ireland where you can still get a pint for a fiver or less, including one in Dublin.

Here is one stat that might sting Dublin drinkers. 1Dublin doesn’t fare well on any measure. Of the 46 pubs in Ireland with a perfect 5.0 Google rating, not a single one is in Dublin. They’re in places like Augher (Tyrone), Kilmakilloge (Kerry), and Rathdowney (Laois).

13 Ireland, the original home of Guinness, experienced a 25% price increase from 2022 to 2026. Five years ago a pint of Guinness in Dublin would cost on average €4.66, with prices now sitting at an average of €6.08.

How Rachel Was Built and Why She Fooled Almost Everyone

Building Rachel was not just a coding exercise. The real challenge was making her sound human in an Irish context.

Cortland used ElevenLabs’ conversational AI platform for the voice and Twilio for telephony. Phone numbers were pulled from Google’s Places API, which indexed over 5,200 pubs across all 32 counties. He used an old Irish SIM card to make the calls feel local.

1 The script went through multiple iterations. Early versions had the agent confirming the price back, which extended calls and gave people a chance to get suspicious. The final version keeps it simple: ask the question, say “thanks very much,” hang up. The transcript captures everything.

Getting the voice right was the hardest part. Cortland tested dozens of options before settling on a Northern Irish accent inspired by Rachel Duffy from The Traitors, the first female traitor to win the show. He wanted someone warm, someone you would believe.

1 Rachel still needs work. She’s alarmingly convincing on a straightforward call, but she struggles with IVR phone menus and Irish banter. When a bartender cracks a joke, she doesn’t always know what to do with it. “Perhaps I should have made her American,” said Cortland.

The calls produced golden moments. At Malzard’s Pub in Kilkenny, the bartender offered to buy Rachel a pint. At Buddy’s Bar in Tipperary, Rachel asked the price and the bartender simply told her where to go.

At The Linen House in Lisburn, Rachel got trapped in a Premier Inn phone system. Two AI systems talked past each other. Rachel said “Oh, dear” four times. Nobody got a pint price.

The whole project cost about €200 to run, plus a lot of Cortland’s time. He used Claude AI to extract prices from the call transcripts.

What This Means for AI, Pubs, and the People Behind the Bar

The Guinndex lands at a moment when people are asking real questions about where AI fits into everyday life.

27 Anthropic published research this month showing that 30% of workers have zero AI exposure, including cooks, mechanics, bartenders, and dishwashers, jobs requiring physical presence that no LLM can replicate. 30 At the top of the exposure scale, computer programmers sit at 74.5%, followed by customer service representatives at 70.1% and data entry clerks at 67.1%. 1 “AI isn’t coming for the person behind the bar,” said Cortland. “As a former bar owner, I know this. AI can’t yet pour a pint, it can’t read a room, it can’t tell when someone’s had enough. But it can call 3,000 pubs in a weekend and tell you where to find a decent pint for under a fiver.”

That distinction matters. The physical, human work of running a pub is safe from automation. But the information layer above it, the pricing data, the transparency, the ability to compare, that is exactly where AI thrives.

1 The AI calls were the jumpstart, but the Guinndex is now open for crowdsourced contributions. Anyone can hit the “Contribute” button on the site to submit the price of their last pint, flag a correction if a price is wrong, or share photos. Pub owners who want to update their listing can also message to make an amendment. 1 “The whole point is for this to be a living index, not a one-off snapshot,” said Cortland. “Rachel got us started, but keeping it accurate means hearing from actual people in actual pubs.”

The full dataset is live at guinndex.ai with an interactive map, county breakdowns, and the ability to search by pub name.

In a country where over 100 pubs are closing every year and the price of a pint keeps climbing, what Cortland built is more than a clever AI experiment. It is a mirror held up to an industry under pressure and a consumer base that deserves to know what they are paying for. Whether the Guinndex can actually help bring prices down remains to be seen. But for the first time in 14 years, someone is at least tracking them. If you are sitting in a pub right now, head to guinndex.ai and tell them what you paid. It takes five seconds. Rachel got the conversation started. Now it is your round.

Drop your thoughts in the comments below. What is the price of a pint at your local