Pinterest is a search engine — and its CEO wants advertisers to know it.
Bill Ready, who joined the company as CEO in 2022 from Google, told Business Insider's editor in chief, Jamie Heller, that Pinterest sees more than 80 billion searches a month.
"Those searches are primarily visual," Ready said, adding that "more than half of those are commercial."
The interview took place at Business Insider's annual CMO Insider Breakfast, with support from founding sponsor BCG, supporting sponsor PayPal, and contributing sponsor LinkedIn.
Pinterest has become a digital mall of sorts, with products and brands placed strategically in the feed. While not every user comes to Pinterest to shop — and may have opened the app or website to passively scroll — it's become a de facto experience. If you arrive at Pinterest, you're going to end up window shopping, at the very least.
Since taking over as Pinterest's CEO, Ready has been laser-focused on "building it out as a shopping platform," he said.
AI is proving to be a key part of that plan.
Pinterest has doubled down on AI-powered visual search tools that guide users through its results, serving up recommended content based on their tastes. Ready said that Pinterest trains open source AI models on the platform's proprietary data, which helps surface those recommendations to its users.
It's also leveraging AI to improve its advertising product.
In 2024, it launched "Pinterest Performance+" to help advertisers better target using visual signals from content. It also offers tools to turn products into more stylized images for platform advertisements using generative AI.
Ready gave an example onstage at Cannes: Imagine someone wants to buy a $5,000 coffee maker.
"They're probably thinking about how that's going to look in their kitchen," Ready said. "When you can personalize down to a level of not just showing them a great coffee maker, but showing them a great coffee maker that is sitting in a kitchen like their kitchen, you're going to have better conversion rates on that, and it's going to be brand-enhancing."
Search and AI innovations have helped strengthen Pinterest's ad business. However, Pinterest's overall ad performance has been uneven, and its stock sits well below its 2021 peak.
"What's holding the company back on monetization?" Heller asked Ready.
"I wouldn't say there's something holding us back," he answered.
"We quadrupled the growth rate of the revenue," Ready said. "But of course you want to get the user engagement first, and the revenue falls in behind that."
While AI is a crucial part of Pinterest's search and advertising business, the platform is still figuring out how its over 630 million users — more than half of whom are Gen Z — feel about AI content in their feeds.
"I'm an entrepreneur by background, an engineer, a technologist, and there's so many great uses of AI, but there's also a bit of a counter movement to that with consumers," Ready said.
Pinterest, like nearly every social media platform, has been scrutinized by some users for too much AI slop.
Last year, it introduced tools that let users limit the amount of AI-generated content they see on their Pinterest feeds.
"We're in this transition period where users are still trying to figure out their own tastes and preferences," Ready said.
Sydney Bradley has been covering media and tech for Business Insider since 2020. She breaks news and writes extensively about Instagram and Facebook, as well as new platforms and startups shaping social media, dating apps, the creator economy, venture capital, and tech culture.Sydney's reporting on Instagram was nominated as a finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Press Club National Entertainment Journalism Awards.She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in American Studies. You can follow Sydney's work on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram at @sydneykbradley.Have a tip? You can also contact her via encrypted messaging app Signal (@sydneykbradley.123), encrypted email ([email protected]), or standard email ([email protected]). Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.Selected stories:
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