Unpacking Pinterest Says There Is No Future For AI Shopping: When human taste beats algorithms

0:00The CEO of Pinterest has basically just said he doesn't believe AI agents are going to be doing any shopping for you in the very near future. He says this is something that is very far away. Now, this is interesting to a lot of people because basically Pinterest is a lot of people know it as a social media site with pretty pictures, but it's actually set up with its data set to be one of the biggest powerhouses in AI and shopping if they leverage it correctly. Today on the podcast, I want to break down what their CEO said, where I believe the industry goes, which I think is actually going to be a little bit of a departure from what this CEO is specifically talking about, how we can expect to see AI agents in the shopping experience and who the big players are in this space because I think some of them might surprise you and some of them are the usual suspects.

0:45So we're getting into all that on the podcast today. Before we do, I wanted to mention if you want to try out all the AI models that I talk about on the show, I'd love for you to go check out my own startup, which is called AIbox.ai. I have over 40 different models. Tons of new ones are coming soon as well. And basically, it's a place where you can test out all of the latest AI models and you can compare the results side by side. You can ask the latest model from Claude versus OpenAI versus DeepSeek versus Google Gemini. Ask the same question, see which one gives you the best result. You can compare them side by side.

1:14And you can also do this with images and audio. You'd use audio from platforms like 11 Labs or images on platforms like Ideogram and even OpenAI's image generator. All of that's on the platform. I would love to have you try it out. It's 19 bucks a month. So you get access to what you typically would be paying$19 per platform. And you get one subscription, get access to everything. So go check it out, AIbox.ai. The link is in the description. Let's get into what the Pinterest CEO has been talking about. So this actually was him talking basically to a bunch of investors in their Q2 earnings call.

1:46And basically everyone knows Pinterest. It's the, you know, the famous website that's like, is a quote unquote social media site, but it's really more like a bookmarking website for images. My wife uses it for inspiration for a ton of projects that she does around the house. But what a lot of people don't know is it's actually a pretty massive driver of traffic for shopping and for products. Basically, you see something pretty on Pinterest, there's ways to take the products and images, you go and see what you're actually looking for. So it's got a really great discovery algorithm that a lot of people are saying should be used and leveraged into building kind of agentic AI shopping experiences.

2:26But their CEO had a different kind of take on this. He said, I think this notion of an AI agent just going and buying all the things for you without you doing anything, I think that's going to be a very, very long cycle for that to play out both in terms of how the users think about it and where users are going to be and when users are going to be ready to just let something go off and do everything for them, save for maybe some very utilitarian journeys. Okay, basically, he's saying like, if you need to go get red pencils and just say, go get me the cheapest red pencil, maybe a very utilitarian, quote unquote, journey, that's what he calls it, could be a great use case.

3:04But he doesn't actually believe that you do this for a lot of other things. I actually have a very different opinion. I think people would love this. I think perhaps the leadership team at Pinterest and the team at Pinterest is not set up and poised to do this. And so he's saying it's far off. And I think that it's today, If you could seriously make, for example, like if Amazon had a way that I could say exactly what I wanted, put all the stipulations in, maybe just like when you're asking chat GPT, you know, deep reasoning or deep research to do something. When you ask it a question, it always asks you like three to five follow up questions to like make sure it knows what you're looking for because it's going to go take like five minutes to go search.

3:45I would imagine a shopping agent would want to do the same kind of thing, right? So you're like, hey, I'm trying to get a really cute present for my daughter's birthday. She's six and she loves princesses. It could ask three to five follow-up questions. Okay, does she have dolls? Is she interested in this? Whatever, right? So it could break down basically some follow-ups. You say yes and just say, you could say surprise me or you could say, bring the exact things into like a pop-up or a text where I can reply yes and then you purchase them if I like what you have. There's a bunch of different ways I think you could make this shopping experience happen.

4:20You could write so you could have the verification or you can just have it go for it. This is a great idea. I think that if it can save people time and research, why not? And I think in the example that I just gave, there's a lot of I think you could go tangential similar kind of examples where basically you're buying a present for another person whose preferences you might not completely know. you might understand, right? Like my wife loves hiking or, you know, my boyfriend loves XYZ topic, but you don't know that much about it, right? Like my brother loves hunting, but like I'm not a big hunter, so I don't know exactly what he needs or wants or be interesting to him.

5:00Then get the AI to go do all the research for you, give it to search and bring it back to you. So I think this is incredibly useful technology. It could save you a lot of time. There's two different ways to do it. one where you just go full send and have it go buy the things and ship them to the people, which would be crazy, or ship them to you maybe, and then you go give them and return them if you don't like them. Tell it to go buy it on Amazon where it's easy to return. Maybe it would be a good first step. Or you could have it do all the research and then maybe send you like a pic, like text you a picture with a price and you just reply yes and it purchases it.

5:30Or like you can have it on your browser, but if you really want to just have it send off on this thing and then you go move on with your life, I think sending you a text as a follow-up like an assistant would be really super cool. So two different ways to do it. But I cannot deny the fact that I think this is incredibly useful. And the fact that Pinterest is saying this is very far away. And they don't think like, they're not just saying, Oh, the technology is too hard, because the technology is not too hard. You literally could do this with like chat GPT agent mode. Basically, you could do this, given the right data and the right permissions and stuff.

5:56But they're saying like, they think it's far away on the user journey, like people aren't going to want it. So I disagree with that. Okay. This is what else he said. He said, but when users say things like Pinterest just gets me, It's because they can open the app and the app is going to make recommendations to them proactively on things that they're really interested in that align with their taste and their style the way that a really great personal shopping assistant would. OK, so on the one hand, he's saying there's no way these agents are going to go buy people's stuff and they're going to be happy about it.

6:22And on the other hand, he's like, we have the greatest algorithm of all time. We know exactly what you want before you even know what you want. Like you get to our website, we're going to tell you things that are trending with the people that are similar to you and you're excited and you like them, blah, blah, blah. Yes, these algorithms understand us. Yes, maybe it's creepy sometimes, but it's accurate a lot of the times. So you don't think this would also be great for shopping or sending us stuff, or maybe you get a subscription mystery box to something that is trending that you're interested in once a month.

6:49I don't know, it's a random business idea that some Pinterest might want to roll out to people, right? Yes, something like that might be more novel than like, I need new kitchen stuff. But anyways, I think this is absolutely a super useful thing people would love, but it evidently looks like Pinterest is not going to be the one to build it. So who's going to be the one to build it? I believe Google will be building much more strongly in this area with Google Shopping and with a lot of things they're doing. It seems like Google will take that more of an agentic shopping approach. I think we're going to see a pretty strong play out of Amazon.

7:20They already have Amazon Rufus, which is basically a chatbot that tells you about the products on their website. They're in this direction. It definitely is a shift in user behavior. And so maybe we won't see it necessarily from the big companies themselves. However, the technology like the LLMs and the AI tools that in the frontier models that the big companies are creating can be leveraged to do this type of shopping. So maybe we'll see startups that actually are pioneering this that get acquired or just become really big in the shopping space till eventually Google and Amazon and everyone can't ignore it and they have to follow suit.

7:52Will Pinterest do it? I think that Pinterest would have been perfectly positioned to take this up and it seems like they're not. So I don't think that they're going to be the ones that really push this overall. Okay, one thing I do have to say that is interesting is Pinterest seems to like, it's not like they hate AI necessarily, but they have had some big AI problems where basically all of Pinterest was completely bogged down by AI generated stuff. Some of it was, you know, quote, quote, AI slop. And so they had to do a lot of work to actually remove it or filter it or or do all sorts of things.

8:24I think YouTube and Facebook and some other companies have also seen similar issues and had to try to fight it. So maybe they have some sort of bad, maybe Pinterest has some sort of bad taste in their mouth against AI. But at the end of the day, I think the AI agent tool would be phenomenal. I would love to see Pinterest build something really cool in the space. Doesn't seem like it's on the horizon, but I think we'll see some other big companies doing it and it's all possible and completely able to be powered by, I think today, Gemini, GPT-5, and the latest model of Claude. So I'm excited. I'll keep you up to date as different companies are rolling out cool tools in this space.

8:59It's always interesting for me to see what some of these big players are saying when I believe they're missing the mark. So I'll call them out when I see it. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. As always, make sure to go check out AIbox.ai if you want to try the latest models and I'll see you in the next episode.