Pinterest unveiled an innovative experimental application, "Ask Pinterest," on Wednesday. This new venture aims to explore a conversational paradigm for shopping and product discovery, with the potential for integration into the primary Pinterest app later. Concurrently, the company introduced several other AI-driven initiatives, such as the Pinterest Model Context Protocol (MCP), specifically developed for advertisers managing campaigns on the platform, alongside additional AI-powered advertising tools.
This announcement precedes the annual Cannes Lions event, a significant gathering for the adtech industry, where the central theme this year revolves around leveraging artificial intelligence to benefit advertisers and marketers.
The "Ask Pinterest" online application provides the company with an additional avenue to utilize its proprietary "Taste Graph," an internal data system that maps users to their individual interests and aesthetic preferences. Pinterest stated that initial access to this application would be limited.
This AI-driven experience is engineered to extend Pinterest's renowned visual discovery capabilities beyond its core application. It introduces a conversational, chatbot-style interface, enabling consumers to pose questions using natural language and receive highly personalized recommendations and inspiration.
The launch coincides with a growing trend where AI chatbots are increasingly vying with traditional search engines for consumer engagement. Major players like Google have already integrated AI to assist online shoppers with product discovery, price tracking, and checkout processes. Similarly, ChatGPT has explored agentic shopping functionalities, a path also pursued by Meta, Shopify, and other industry leaders.
Instead of positioning itself as a licensable source of product recommendations for external AI services, Pinterest has predominantly concentrated its efforts on utilizing its extensive proprietary data to train its AI models and drive its internal AI product development.
Furthermore, by developing "Ask Pinterest" as a distinct, standalone application, the company gains a controlled environment to experiment with this new technology without impacting or altering the core user experience of the main Pinterest platform.
Pinterest clarifies that "Ask Pinterest" is designed to handle more intricate or multi-stage queries that might not be suitable for conventional Pinterest search. Users could, for example, leverage the app to assist with planning a dinner party or progressively furnishing a room. The company's objective, as stated, is to assess and investigate how AI can more effectively enhance shopping experiences while consistently preserving the user's context across multiple sessions.
Significantly, "Ask Pinterest" can also draw upon users' personal saved Pins and Boards to further personalize its responses and recommendations.
Pinterest anticipates that the insights gleaned from this experimental app will be instrumental in developing more sophisticated AI-powered experiences for its flagship application in the future.
The unveiling of Pinterest’s new application was accompanied by a suite of updates targeting marketers, notably including the introduction of an AI assistant, currently in beta, within its U.S. Ads Manager.
Globally, a new AI model named Performance+ creative was also launched, designed to assist advertisers in selecting the most effective ad creative from various options, optimizing for the highest probable performance each time an advertisement is displayed. Furthermore, the newly announced MCP infrastructure layer will empower advertisers to standardize the management and monitoring of their campaigns when utilizing external third-party agentic tools.
In a statement accompanying the announcement, Lee Brown, Pinterest’s Chief Business Officer, highlighted the evolving landscape of web search. He remarked that "the future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations" — a domain where Brown asserts Pinterest possesses a "unique advantage."
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