Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said Friday (Aug. 8) that it will be some time before consumers are ready to let artificial intelligence (AI) agents do their shopping for them, but that Pinterest is providing AI-powered tools that will “meet the user where they are” in the meantime.
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.