Pinterest introduced an experimental artificial intelligence (AI) shopping app, Ask Pinterest, this week, five months after cutting its workforce to redirect resources toward AI.
The app, accessible through web browsers on desktop and mobile at ask.pinterest.com, lets users describe shopping needs in natural language rather than keywords. Pinterest currently limits access to a small group of users in the United States. The app runs separately from Pinterest’s main service, letting the company test the technology without changing the experience for its roughly 631 million active users.
Ask Pinterest draws on the company’s Taste Graph, an internal system mapping users’ interests, aesthetics and intent, along with their saved Pins and Boards when they are signed in. Pinterest says the tool is built for multi step requests that do not fit a single search, such as planning a dinner party on a budget or furnishing a room over several months, and that it retains context across sessions.
Pinterest Chief Business Officer Lee Brown said keyword search alone would not define the next era of online discovery, arguing instead that it “will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations.”
The launch comes after Pinterest said in January it would cut less than 15 percent of its workforce and reduce its office space, a restructuring the company tied directly to redirecting resources toward artificial intelligence.
Pinterest’s approach differs from several large retailers that have struck partnerships to put their products inside other companies’ AI tools. Etsy, Target and Walmart have worked with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot to list products on those platforms, and with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to make merchandise available there. Amazon and Walmart have also built their own consumer facing AI shopping assistants. Pinterest has instead trained its models largely on its own data and kept its AI tools in house, including by launching Ask Pinterest as a separate app rather than folding it into the main product.
Alongside Ask Pinterest, the company introduced Business Assistant, a beta AI tool inside Ads Manager in the United States that surfaces trends and performance data through graphs and example Pins rather than a text chat. It also unveiled new Performance+ creative capabilities aimed at identifying which ad creative performs best for individual impressions, and Pinterest Model Context Protocol, infrastructure that lets advertisers connect campaign data to third party AI agents through a standardised framework.
The announcements arrived ahead of Cannes Lions 2026, where Pinterest is set to host its Manifestival event at Carlton Beach Club and where artificial intelligence is expected to dominate conversations among advertisers and marketers.
What Pinterest does with the data from Ask Pinterest’s limited rollout, rather than the app itself, will determine whether the experiment reaches the main platform or stays confined to a small group of test users in one country.
