AI agents calling thousands of pubs to track beer prices
31 March 2026 · 1 min read · Originally posted on LinkedIn
How much is the average pint of Guinness in Ireland right now? Well, that's something that Matthew Cortland wanted to know. The Irish Government stopped tracking prices back in 2011, but Matt wanted answers. "
So he got hold of Anthropic's Claude, enlisted ElevenLabs text-to-speech and had the combined app make calls to 3,000 pubs across Ireland to ask how much they were selling a pint for.
Humans answered and appeared to genuinely respond!
Genius.
Now Matthew has setup Guinndex - it has over 6,000 pub pint prices tracked, some in near real time.
It shows what you can do with the tech. Great work Matthew!
"And in case you're wondering, the current average price of a pint in Ireland is €6.01.