Pinterest CEO Downplays Agentic Shopping, Emphasizes AI-Enabled Assistance

Pinterest CEO says agentic shopping is still a long way out | TechCrunch

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready told investors on the company's second-quarter earnings call that the social app and inspirational bookmarking site could be considered an "AI-enabled shopping assistant." However, he thinks that the agentic web, where AI agents shop on users' behalf, is still far in the future. The remarks were made in response to a question about the agentic web, which could impact the search funnel and businesses like Pinterest, which positions itself at the early stages of the shopping journey -- around the time when users are seeking ideas that could later turn into purchases. Investors are likely concerned that if AI began to understand users' interests, they could preemptively direct users to shop from their own personalized recommendations instead of using platforms like Pinterest. "I think this notion of an agent just going and buying all the things for you without you doing anything -- ," Ready said on the Q2 earnings call. "I think that's going to be a very, very long cycle for that to play out, both in terms of how the users think about it, where the users are going to be ready to just let something go run off and do everything for them, save for maybe some very utilitarian journeys," he noted. Still, he pushed for Pinterest to be thought of as an AI-enabled shopping assistant, saying that the company doesn't talk about it that way, usually, because it's not how users think of it. "But when users say things like 'Pinterest just gets me,' it's because they can open the app and the app is going to make recommendations to them proactively on things that they're really interested in, that align with their taste and their style, the way that a really great personal shopping assistant would," he said. The company referred to this moment in time, when businesses are exploring all the ways to create new, AI-driven experiences, as a "Cambrian moment," and touched on the various ways it had put AI to work already. This included AI-powered recommendation and personalization systems, the use of proprietary AI models (including multimodal AI that combines text and images), visual search experiences, conversational search, and AI-powered advertising efficiencies. Not addressed were the growing user concerns that too much of Pinterest is now filled with AI-generated, low-quality content. The situation became so bad that Pinterest earlier this year had to launch a new set of tools to fight this invasion, like labels for AI-generated images and controls for users to filter out Gen AI Pins. The discussion also omitted mention of mass user bans, which users believe stem from an overreliance on poorly designed AI moderation systems. (Pinterest wouldn't say if that's the case, only chalking them up to an internal error. However, similar problems are cropping up across social media, including on Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr.) On the call, Ready also spoke about how Pinterest aims to compete in the war for AI talent, saying that people who want to work there care about AI that's used for good and used "responsibly." "On the mission side, I think we really, really punch above our weight," the exec explained. "Both in terms of what we're doing with tuning AI for positivity, creating a more positive alternative to what's happening in the rest of social media," he said. Pinterest stock dropped after earnings, as the company reported a beat on sales, with revenue of $998 million, but earnings per share at 33 cents (adjusted), fell short of the 35 cents analysts expected. The company also noted that over half its monthly users were Gen Z, and male users were up 95% year-over-year.

Pinterest CEO Says Consumers Benefit From AI-Powered Tools | PYMNTS.com

Speaking during the company's quarterly earnings call, and responding to an analyst's question about how agentic AI may impact the search funnel, Ready said that in terms of AI agents buying things without the customer being involved, it's going to be "a very, very long cycle for that to play out" because customers will have to get used to that idea. "But if we look at what's happening on our platform already, we're able to take the user much further down that shopping journey assisting them," Ready said, according to the company's transcript of the call. Ready said Pinterest has "really made AI central to everything that we're doing." He pointed to the platform's ability to make recommendations that align with each user's taste and style, to effectively curate products for users based on very small signals, and to save users some of the time and work that goes into the shopping journey. "We see really great early signs of that," Ready said. "And we think there's a lot more that we're going to be able to do there that we will focus on in a very user-centric way that meets the user where they are, but with AI and LLMs (large language models) and agentic capabilities deeply embedded in the way that we're doing that." The company aims to use generative AI to keep discovery joyful and make shopping frictionless, Pinterest Vice President of Design Dana Cho told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in May. "Technology has nailed the buying part," Cho said. "Now, we're bringing the joy back to shopping." The PYMNTS Intelligence and Fiserv collaboration "GenAI Applications in Retail Transaction Analysis: Industry Trends and Insights" found that retailers are rapidly adopting Gen AI to enhance customer personalization. Fifty-four percent of retailers used the technology to analyze transaction and payments data for customer segmentation in the last year, according to the report.