**Pinterest Bets on Open Source AI to Drive Innovation and Manage Costs Amid Revenue Concerns**
On a recent earnings call, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready highlighted the company’s strategic embrace of open source artificial intelligence (AI) models as a key factor in keeping operational costs down, even as the company pushes forward with expanding the use of visual AI across its platform. This move comes at a critical time for Pinterest, which, despite its reputation as a starting point for consumers’ shopping journeys, faces near-term revenue headwinds and increasing investor scrutiny about its future growth prospects in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
**AI at the Core of Pinterest’s User Experience**
Pinterest, best known for its virtual image “pinboards” where users discover and organize ideas, has long leveraged AI to power a variety of user-facing features. These include personalized content recommendations, a sophisticated search system that combines both text and images (known as multimodal search), targeted advertising, and, most recently, the AI-powered Pinterest Assistant, which helps users discover products relevant to their tastes and interests.
The integration of AI into these core services is crucial for Pinterest’s strategy to remain a central player in the online discovery and shopping journey. As consumers increasingly expect seamless, personalized, and visually rich shopping experiences, Pinterest’s investment in AI positions it to meet these evolving demands.
**Investor Questions About Agentic Commerce**
During the earnings call, investors pressed the company for clarity on its potential in “agentic commerce”—a term describing AI systems that can act autonomously on behalf of users, such as making purchases or managing shopping lists. With advancements in AI accelerating quickly, investors are keen to understand Pinterest’s plans for more autonomous, AI-driven shopping experiences and how these could translate into new revenue streams or cost savings.
This line of questioning has become more urgent in light of Pinterest’s recent financial update. In its third-quarter earnings announcement, the company forecasted a weaker holiday shopping season than analysts had expected. Pinterest specifically cited the lingering impact of tariffs imposed during Donald Trump’s presidency, which have hurt categories like home furnishings. As a result, Pinterest projected fourth-quarter revenue between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, slightly below the average analyst estimate of $1.34 billion. The news rattled investors, sending Pinterest’s stock down by more than 21% the following day.
**Open Source AI: A Path to Efficiency**
Despite these immediate revenue concerns, CEO Bill Ready offered a positive outlook on Pinterest’s ability to harness AI innovation while keeping costs in check. He explained that while Pinterest already relies on proprietary AI models built into its cost structure, the company regularly evaluates leading commercial (off-the-shelf) AI models against open-source alternatives. The results, he said, have been “tremendous”—particularly when open source models are fine-tuned for Pinterest’s specific visual AI use cases.
Ready shared with investors that the company is seeing “orders of magnitude reduction in cost with comparable performance” when using these open source models, especially