Pinterest turns into ‘shopping assistant’, says CEO

The company said artificial intelligence (AI) now underpins nearly every part of its platform, from search and discovery to shopping recommendations and the new conversational Pinterest Assistant

Pinterest has transformed from a digital mood board into what CEO Bill Ready called an “AI-powered visual-first shopping assistant”, Pinterest execs told investors in the Q3 earnings call Tuesday.

The company said artificial intelligence (AI) now underpins nearly every part of its platform, from search and discovery to shopping recommendations and the new conversational Pinterest Assistant.

Ready said Pinterest’s mission is to “anticipate what users will love next,” describing how the company’s AI systems are designed to predict inspiration before users even search. “Unlike chat or search platforms that wait for users to type a prompt, our AI curates inspiration that’s ready the moment they return.”

Third-quarter revenue gained 17% to $1.049 billion, slightly ahead of U.S. stock market expectations, according to the company’s earnings report for the period ending September 30. Monthly active users jumped 12% to 600 million. Ready said all users logged in are generating “billions of first-party intent signals” that train its recommendation systems.

The company processed 80 billion monthly queries in the third quarter, up 44% from a year earlier. Visual search drives most of that growth, and users are conducting more searches per session, signalling deeper engagement and stronger commercial intent.

Pinterest launched its first multimodal search tool in May, starting with women’s fashion. The feature combines text and image inputs for more precise results and will expand to more categories in 2025. The company is also testing a voice-based Pinterest Assistant that converts open-ended prompts like “what outfits match this theme” or “make these home ideas brighter” into curated visual results.

Ready said this combination of first-party data and personalization gives Pinterest “a distinct right to win” in visual discovery.

As we provide more value to our users by surfacing what they’re looking for, they engage more deeply, he said.

Pinterest credited AI with lifting engagement per user faster than total user growth. Yet the scope of its features, spanning shopping, conversational search, recommendation, and advertising, raises questions about cost and focus.

We see a clear path to sustainable growth, Ready said, but AI is the heart of that experience, and it comes with higher infrastructure investments.