Pinterest on Wednesday announced a new experimental app called \u201cAsk Pinterest\u201d that will allow the company to explore a more conversational approach to shopping and product discovery that could eventually find its way to the main Pinterest app. It also introduced other AI initiatives, including Pinterest Model Context Protocol (MCP), designed for advertisers running campaigns on Pinterest\u2019s platform, and other AI ad tools.<\/p>\n
The news comes just ahead of the adtech industry\u2019s annual gathering at Cannes Lions, which this year is mainly focused on how AI can serve the needs of advertisers and marketers.<\/p>\n
The \u201cAsk Pinterest\u201d online application gives the company another way to utilize its \u201cTaste Graph\u201d \u2014 its internal data mapping people to their interests and aesthetics. It will initially be available in limited access, the company said. <\/p>\n
The AI-powered experience is designed to expand the visual discovery experience Pinterest is known for beyond the main app to a conversational, chatbot-like interface where consumers can ask questions using natural language to get more personalized recommendations and inspiration.<\/p>\n
It also arrives as AI chatbots are increasingly competing with traditional search engines for consumers\u2019 attention. Google has already put AI to work to help online shoppers find what they need, track prices, and check out. ChatGPT also experimented with agentic shopping, as have Meta, Shopify, and others.<\/p>\n
Rather than turning itself into a source of product recommendations that other AI services could leverage through licensing deals, Pinterest has largely focused on using its own data to train AI models and power its AI products.<\/p>\n Plus, by making Ask Pinterest a stand-alone app, the company has a way to experiment with the technology without disrupting the main Pinterest experience.<\/p>\n The company explains that Ask Pinterest could work for more complex or multistep queries that wouldn\u2019t fit a traditional Pinterest search. For instance, you could use the app to ask for help planning a dinner party or furnishing a room over time. The idea, says Pinterest, is to test and explore how AI could better support people\u2019s shopping experiences while retaining the user\u2019s context across sessions.<\/p>\n Ask Pinterest can also leverage users\u2019 own saved Pins and Boards to personalize its answers when users sign in.<\/p>\n In time, these results will help Pinterest when building more AI-powered experiences for the company\u2019s flagship app, the company believes.<\/p>\n Pinterest\u2019s new app was announced alongside the updates aimed at marketers, including the introduction of an AI assistant, still in beta, in its Ads Manager in the U.S. <\/p>\n A new AI model within Performance+ was also introduced globally to help advertisers pick between different ad creatives to find the one that\u2019s likely to perform best each time the ad is shown. And the MCP infrastructure layer that Pinterest announced will allow advertisers to manage and monitor their campaigns using other third-party agentic tools in a standardized way.<\/p>\n In an announcement sharing the news, Pinterest\u2019s chief business officer, Lee Brown, gestured toward the changing nature of web search, remarking that \u201cthe future of discovery won\u2019t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations\u201d \u2014 an area where Pinterest feels it has a \u201cunique advantage,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n Ask Pinterest is currently available to a limited number of people via the web, both mobile and desktop, the company says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/06\/17\/pinterest-launches-an-experimental-ai-shopping-app-called-ask-pinterest\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ask-pinterest.jpg?resize=1200,922″] Pinterest on Wednesday announced a new experimental app called \u201cAsk Pinterest\u201d that will allow the company to explore a more conversational approach to shopping and product discovery that could eventually find its way to the main Pinterest app. It also introduced other AI initiatives, including Pinterest Model Context Protocol (MCP), designed for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,62],"class_list":["post-2002418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-techcrunch-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2002418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002418\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2002418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2002418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2002418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/ask-pinterest-at-4.54.23-PM.jpg?w=633\")
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