In an earnings call Tuesday, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready highlighted the promise of open-source AI models that will help the company keep costs down as it expands the use cases for visual AI.
The image pinboarding site, which often serves as consumers’ first step in their shopping journey, leverages AI technology to power a variety of features, including its personalized recommendations, a multimodal search experience that combines text and images, ad targeting and, most recently, product discovery with the launch of the AI-powered Pinterest Assistant.
But investors wanted to know where Pinterest’s opportunity in agency commerce — artificial intelligence systems that can act autonomously on behalf of users — stood in the rapidly changing AI landscape and how that might affect its bottom line and growth potential.
This question has become more pressing. During the company’s third quarter earnings call, he predicted a weaker holiday shopping period than expected, citing President Donald Trump’s tariffs and their negative impact on the home furnishings category. As a result, Pinterest’s fourth-quarter revenue is expected to range between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, while analysts were estimating $1.34 billion on average. The news sent the stock down more than 21% on Wednesday.
Despite near-term revenue concerns, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready pointed to ways the business could maximize its use of artificial intelligence and LLMs (large language models) without dramatically increasing its costs. In addition to its own proprietary models already factored into its cost structure, Ready said the company tests leading off-the-shelf models against open-source options on a regular basis and has found the open-source models promising.
“One of the really, really interesting things that we’re seeing is that we’re getting tremendous performance from open source models specifically for Pinterest use cases in visual AI,” Ready told investors. “Given current market prices and cost per token, in early testing, we see orders of magnitude of cost reduction with comparable performance using optimized open source models versus leading off-the-shelf proprietary models.”
He said the company planned to move forward with several open-source models for its various use cases, which would be at “a fraction of the cost” of the larger model providers.
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“We feel very good about the value we’re bringing to the user there, our ability to align that with monetization and our ability to control those costs and deliver it efficiently,” Ready said.
The executive also touched on other areas where Pinterest is looking at how best to use AI, including shopping with agents. Ready said Pinterest already offers “push-button shopping” through its partnership with Amazon, and he’ll wait to see if users actually want AI to “push the button for them.”
Meanwhile, Ready suggested that Pinterest’s biggest differentiator is that it guides the user through the shopping experience — something it hopes to improve with Pinterest Assistant, an AI companion user can talk to, asking for advice and recommendations. The assistant understands the user based on their boards, collages, saves and how they compare to people with similar tastes, the company says.
Pinterest is also rolling out personalized AI-curated boards, which Ready says combine expert human curation and artificial intelligence.
