Pinterest Launches Ask Pinterest to Test Conversational Shopping

Pinterest announced Ask Pinterest on June 17, 2026, a standalone experimental app that gives the company a contained space to test conversational AI shopping before deciding whether to bring it into the main Pinterest experience that hundreds of millions of users already use daily.

The decision to build it as a separate app rather than a feature inside the existing platform is the most operationally significant detail in the announcement.

Pinterest can test how people actually use natural language to plan complex, multi-step purchases, the company's examples include planning a dinner party on a budget or furnishing a room over time, without risking disruption to the search-and-discovery experience that defines the core app today.

Ask Pinterest draws on the company's Taste Graph, its internal mapping of people to their interests and aesthetics, and can use a signed-in user's own saved Pins and Boards to personalize results, according to their press release.

"The future of discovery won't be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations," said Lee Brown, Chief Business Officer at Pinterest. "Pinterest has a unique advantage because people come to our platform to plan, curate and take action on what they want to do next."

Alongside Ask Pinterest, Pinterest introduced a set of AI tools aimed specifically at advertisers, timed ahead of the Cannes Lions advertising industry gathering.

Business Assistant, now in beta inside Ads Manager in the US, gives advertisers a tool that responds to questions with visuals rather than walls of text, surfacing trending pins and explaining how specific user interests are growing in ways a brand could use to inspire its own campaigns.

Pinterest's new Model Context Protocol addresses a different problem: how advertisers manage campaigns across the growing number of AI copilots and agentic tools they now rely on, according to the press release.

Developed with partners including PMG and Dentsu, the MCP gives those third-party tools secure, standardized access to campaign, analytics, and keyword insights grounded specifically in Pinterest's taste and intent signals, rather than requiring advertisers to manually move data between platforms.

The most quantifiably tested of the new tools is the dynamic creative selection model for Performance+, Pinterest's AI-powered advertising suite.

By evaluating a broader set of creative variants and selecting the one most likely to perform for each individual ad impression, the new model increased click volume by 7.5% in testing compared to the platform's previous single-variant approach.