Pinterest has taken some really cool steps to make sure users feel good about the shopping experience. Recently, they have rolled out new artificial intelligence (AI) features, meant to usher consumers along their buying journey. Our latest Pinterest Assistant is here to help! With this AI sidekick, users gain the power to ask for suggestions and tips — a groundbreaking step for the visual pinboarding platform.
This relatively new tool helps shoppers find what they’re looking for more easily by surfacing personalized recommendations based on specific user behavior. Pinterest Assistant takes users through a conversation and straight to their ideal, customized recommendations. This is what makes it such an invaluable resource to those looking to get their shopping adventures started.
Pinterest has also leveraged advanced AI technology to power a range of features, including personalized recommendations that cater to a user’s unique tastes. The platform includes a unique, multimodal search experience. It marries text and images, allowing users to visually and intuitively browse and discover products. This one, non-technical approach has a huge impact on the user experience. Pinterest evolves from a “beauty looks” inspiration hub into an actual shopping tool.
Beyond these creative applications, Pinterest uses AI for targeting advertising—specifically to improve the relevance of ads that get served to their users. The company today introduced an AI-based product discovery helper. This effort further cements its place as the starting point and one stop shop for all consumers getting started on the buying continuum. Bill Ready, the new CEO of Pinterest, recently described the promise of open-source AI models. He highlighted how these models are able to reduce operational costs while improving performance.
“One of the really, really interesting things that we’re seeing is that we are just getting tremendous performance from open source models specifically for Pinterest use cases on visual AI,” – Bill Ready
During early testing of these models, Ready observed significant cost savings.
“Given current market rates and per token costs, in early testing, we’re seeing orders of magnitude reduction in cost with comparable performance using fine-tuned open source models versus leading off-the-shelf proprietary models,” – Bill Ready
Ready expressed confidence in the value these innovations bring to users while aligning with Pinterest’s monetization strategies and cost control efforts.
“We feel really good about the value that we’re bringing to the user there, our ability to align that with monetization, and our ability to control those costs and deliver that effectively,” – Bill Ready
Despite these innovations, Pinterest has recently forecast a disappointing shopping season this holiday. The company partially blamed this lower forecast on the economic climate, including economic impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
