AI E BIRRA: quando un agente fa 3000 telefonate ai pub per il prezzo della Guinness... #1545

·13 min·1 clip

Matt Cortland's AI agent Rachel made over 3,000 calls to Irish pubs to track Guinness prices after official statistics stopped.

The episode begins with host Matteo Flora introducing himself and the show's focus on how the internet changes us. He launches into the main story: Matt Cortland, founder of an AI startup, was charged 7.80 euros for a Guinness in a Dublin pub in March. Annoyed, he discovered Ireland's Central Statistics Office had stopped tracking Guinness prices in 2011. Cortland used Eleven Labs' software to create a synthetic voice agent named Rachel, with an Irish-Northern accent, which made over 3,000 calls to pubs across Ireland asking for the price of a pint. The collected data was used to build the Guinness index website. Flora notes that most baristas did not realize they were speaking with an AI. He cites data from Regal, a voice AI platform, which found people spend 14% more time chatting with AI agents than humans and give 20% longer answers, a phenomenon linked to Kahneman's concept of cognitive ease. Flora explains the Guinness index works by transforming information asymmetry into forced transparency. This acts as a behavioral nudge, as described by Thaler and Sunstein, where making hidden information visible changes behavior without coercion. Pub owners lower prices not because of regulation, but from fear of social comparison. Flora highlights the paradox: this AI pipeline, using synthetic voices, autonomous agents, and language models, typically extracts value in surveillance capitalism, but here it increases consumer purchasing power. Cortland plans to replicate the index for U.S. prescription drugs and New York pizza. Flora argues this approach could disrupt sectors where price opacity is the business model. He states AI voice is becoming the new front-end for automation, capable of natural conversation. The episode raises a critical question: if people don't know they're talking to a machine, where is the border between efficiency and deception? Flora references Kranzberg's first law of technology: technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral; it amplifies the intentions of its users. Cortland's intention was simply to know beer prices. The same tech stack can be used for spam calls or consumer clarity. The lesson is that transparency is an effective tool because it makes hiding impossible. Flora concludes by noting the future involves algorithms that save you money on beer while others try to sell you insurance, with the difference lying in human intention. He ends with a promo for his AI course, Zero to AI.

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