In an earnings call Tuesday, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready touted the promise of an open-source AI model to help the company keep its costs down as it expands the use cases for visual AI.
The image pinboarding site, which often serves as the first step in a consumer’s shopping journey, uses AI technology to power features including personalized recommendations, a multimodal search experience that integrates text and images, ad targeting, and most recently, product discovery with the launch of its AI-powered Pinterest Assistant.
However, investors wanted to know what Pinterest’s opportunity is in agentic commerce — AI systems that can act autonomously on behalf of users — given the rapidly changing AI landscape, and how that might affect its bottom line and growth prospects.
That question has become more pressing. During the company’s third-quarter earnings announcement, it made a forecast Weak holiday shopping season President Donald Trump’s tariffs are higher than expected citing their negative impact on the home furnishings sector. As a result, Pinterest’s fourth-quarter revenue is expected to come in between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, compared to analysts’ estimates of $1.34 billion, on average. The news sent the stock tumbling more than 21% on Wednesday.
Despite near-term revenue concerns, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready points to ways the business can use AI and LLMs (large language models) without dramatically increasing its costs. In addition to its own proprietary models that are already accounted for in its cost structure, Ready said the company tests off-the-shelf models against open-source alternatives on a regular basis and finds 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, especially in Pinterest’s use of visual AI,” Ready told investors. “Given current market rates and cost per token, in early testing, we’re seeing orders of magnitude reductions in cost with comparable performance using fine-tuned open source models versus leading off-the-shelf proprietary models.”
He said the company plans to move forward with open-source models for many of its use cases, which will come at “a fraction of the cost” of larger model providers.
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“We feel really good about our ability to align the value we’re bringing to the user there, with monetization, and our ability to control those costs and deliver effectively,” Reddy said.
The executive also touched on other areas where Pinterest is considering how best to use AI, including agentic shopping. Ready said Pinterest already offers “push-button type buying” through its Amazon partnership, and will wait to see if users actually want AI to “push the button for them.”
Meanwhile, Ready suggests that Pinterest’s biggest differentiator is the way it guides users through the shopping experience — something it hopes to improve with. Pinterest Assistant, An AI companion users can talk to, ask for advice and recommendations. Assistant understands users based on their boards, collages, saves and how they compare to people with similar tastes, the company says.
Pinterest is also launching personalized boards curated with AI, which Ready says combines expert human curation and AI.