Pinterest has introduced a new feature that it says will revolutionise the way people shop online. Pinterest Assistant is designed to meet the desire for “a personal stylist, interior decorator or party planner: somebody who knows your tastes as well as you do, and can help you manifest, discover and shop your perfect aesthetic”. 

It’s said to be the “first AI-powered, visual-first collaborator that transforms online shopping and discovery. Whether you’re searching for the perfect outfit for a first date or new bedding for winter, Pinterest Assistant solves the ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ problem that all of us face when shopping”. 

When a shopper talks to it, the tech will offer “proactive recommendations that fit your style, leveraging the diverse content and actions from our nearly 600 million monthly active users”.

It draws from the shopper’s saves, boards, collages, and others with similar tastes, to deliver products that should fit the bill.

And the company said it’s “unlike traditional search or chatbots, which are helpful once you already know what you’re looking for”. Instead it’s “designed for the moments when you don’t. It offers visual, personalised and proactive recommendations, like a best friend suggesting the perfect new look. Pinterest Assistant is your personal collaborator, allowing you to discover, get inspired and shop all in one place”.

Company CEO Bill Ready said: “People, especially Gen Z, say that the magic of Pinterest is that it ‘just gets me’, whether that’s finding the perfect outfit or knowing your distinct style. With Pinterest Assistant, we’re supercharging that magic by leveraging AI to help our users discover and shop like they would with that person who knows them best.”

Pinterest is particularly popular for Gen Z shoppers and their activity on the platform “makes our AI smarter. Our systems learn from these billions of signals and our proprietary Taste-graph and it’s why our latest multimodal AI model for visual search outperforms off-the-shelf models by over 30% on the relevancy of shopping recommendations,” we’re told.

But what’s meant to set Pinterest Assistant apart is its visual-first AI, “which uses real-time, conversational descriptors and first-party actions to deliver visual inspiration and shoppable products. This evolution expands multimodal search, allowing context to seamlessly flow between images, voice and text. With voice-enabled conversation, searching on Pinterest becomes even more visual and closer to how people shop in real life”.