Pinterest is rolling out a new set of artificial intelligence tools aimed at advertisers, partners and shoppers as it adapts to a more conversational and generative internet. The company said the updates are designed to help brands work with more context-rich signals while making product discovery and shopping more personalized.
The announcements, timed ahead of Cannes Lions, include Business Assistant, Pinterest MCP, new Performance+ creative capabilities and Ask Pinterest, a limited-access experimental app for testing AI-driven shopping experiences.
Pinterest said the changes reflect a shift away from search based only on keywords and toward systems that can respond to taste, intent and recommendations. Lee Brown, Pinterest’s chief business officer, said the company sees a future in which discovery is shaped by context and trusted guidance rather than search terms alone.
One of the main additions is Business Assistant, an AI tool built into Ads Manager and Pinterest mobile. The feature is in closed beta in the US and is meant to act as a collaborator for advertisers, combining information about a business with Pinterest’s own platform insights.
Rather than presenting long text responses, Pinterest said the tool is designed to be visual. It can show trend data in graphs and surface Pins that may be useful for promoting a campaign. The company gave an example of a search trend for “clean beauty routine” rising 42% in a week, with the assistant showing how interest is moving and highlighting related Pins.
Business Assistant also sends proactive notifications on mobile about trends, performance updates and opportunities to improve campaigns.
Pinterest is also introducing Pinterest MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, which is intended to connect Pinterest with the copilots and agentic tools advertisers already use. The company said the system provides secure access to campaign, analytics and keyword insights while grounding partner workflows in Pinterest-specific signals such as taste, trends and intent.
Pinterest said it is developing the protocol with alpha partners including PMG, Pacvue, Dentsu, Havas, Innovid by Mediaocean and Omnicom’s Jump450. Feedback from those companies is shaping how the tool handles reporting, analysis, campaign planning and execution.
Chris Ivey, president of Jump450, said the integration helps teams analyze performance and act on opportunities without switching tools. Pinterest said the aim is to make its data more usable inside the software marketers already rely on.
The company is also updating Pinterest Performance+ creative with a new AI model that can evaluate a broader range of creative assets and choose the variation most likely to perform for each ad impression. Pinterest said the approach shifts optimization from the ad level to the individual asset level, which it expects to improve personalization for users and results for advertisers.
In testing, the new model increased click volume by 7.5% compared with the previous single-variant model, according to Pinterest. The updated Performance+ creative tools are available globally.
Pinterest said advertisers will also get new ad review tools and more detailed creative reporting, giving them more visibility into how ads appear and perform on the platform.
Pinterest is also launching Ask Pinterest in the US as a separate experimental app to explore more conversational and visual shopping experiences. The company described it as a way to test how AI can support more complex buying decisions that unfold over time, such as planning a dinner party on a budget, finding a personalized gift or furnishing a room.
The app uses Pinterest’s taste graph and other proprietary signals to generate recommendations, while preserving context across sessions. Pinterest said the lessons learned from Ask Pinterest will help inform future AI features in its main app.
Taken together, the announcements show Pinterest leaning further into AI as it tries to make its platform more useful for advertisers and more intuitive for discovery and shopping.