#16 – An AI and 3,000 Irish pubs
An AI called 3,000 Irish pubs pretending to be a customer. Your brand, what would it say? During the St. Patrick's Day weekend, thousands of Irish pubs received a phone call. On the other side, a voice with a Northern Irish accent, warm and polite, always asked the same question: how much is a pint of Guinness?
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During St. Patrick's weekend, thousands of Irish pubs received a phone call. On the other end, a voice with a Northern Irish accent, warm and polite, always asked the same question: how much is a pint of Guinness?
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The voice was called Rachel. And Rachel doesn't exist.
It was an AI created by Matt Cortland, an American engineer who paid €7.80 for a pint in Dublin and, instead of accepting it with the resignation of a tourist who knows they've fallen into a trap, built a national price index.
- text: Over a weekend, Rachel called more than 3,000 establishments, got prices from over 1,000, and generated the most complete data map on the cost of a Guinness across all of Ireland. The bartenders thought they were talking to a person. Almost none suspected anything.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's scraping with a Northern Irish accent.
For years, when we talked about AI "gathering information about your brand," the mental image was of an invisible robot going through your website, reading prices, product sheets, and corporate texts. Something happening in the background, without anyone interacting with you.
Ireland changes that image. AI no longer waits for you to publish the information. If it can’t find it, it goes looking for it. It calls you, asks questions, listens, and builds its own database. And if your answer is confusing, incomplete, or downright hostile, like the pub that told Rachel “fuck you” (that’s also a piece of data), AI records it, classifies it, and uses it.
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What makes this case especially useful for understanding the moment we’re living in is its simplicity. There are no complex algorithms to explain. An AI called, asked, listened, and took notes. That’s it. But behind that simplicity, there’s a trend that’s no longer futuristic: the proliferation of agents. Not just Open Claw, which was the most downloaded open-source agent project in history with 1.8 million downloads reported in March 2026. Platforms like OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic are increasingly putting into anyone’s hands—not just engineers—the ability to create their own autonomous assistants that act on their
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behalf.
They search, compare, call, book, buy. And they do it following criteria, not emotions. This means that brands no longer just compete for people's attention. They compete to be the right answer when an AI makes the decision.
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Which brings us to the next question; Not whether you have an AI strategy (that's another post), but something more immediate: if a Rachel called your business, or browsed your website, or checked your reviews, what data would she build about you? Are your prices clear? Is your value proposition readable for a machine, not just a human? Is the information about your brand on the internet what you put there, or what others have left?
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Rachel has already hung up. But more will come. And next time she might not have a Northern Irish accent.
Source:
- text: https://www.thejournal.ie/ai-chatbot-pub-price-guinness-index-6993360-Mar2026/
