On an earnings name on Tuesday, Pinterest CEO Invoice Prepared highlighted the promise of open supply AI fashions in serving to the corporate hold its prices down because it expands the use instances for visible AI.

The picture pinboarding web site, which regularly serves as shoppers’ first step of their buying journey, leverages AI know-how to energy quite a lot of options, together with its customized suggestions, a multimodal search expertise that mixes textual content and pictures, advert concentrating on, and, most not too long ago, product discovery with the launch of its AI-powered Pinterest Assistant.

Nevertheless, buyers wished to know what Pinterest’s alternative in agentic commerce — AI techniques that may act autonomously on behalf of customers — was given the quickly altering AI panorama, and the way that would impression its backside line and progress potential.

That query has change into extra urgent. Through the firm’s third-quarter earnings announcement, it predicted a weaker vacation buying season than anticipated, citing President Donald Trump’s tariffs and their adverse impression on the house furnishings class. In consequence, Pinterest’s fourth-quarter income is anticipated to come back in between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, whereas analysts have been estimating $1.34 billion, on common. The information despatched the inventory tumbling by greater than 21% on Wednesday.

Regardless of the near-term income issues, Pinterest CEO Invoice Prepared pointed to methods the enterprise may maximize its use of AI and LLMs (giant language fashions), with out dramatically rising its prices. Along with its personal proprietary fashions which are already accounted for in its value construction, Prepared stated the corporate exams main off-the-shelf fashions towards open-source choices frequently, and located the open-source fashions promising.

“One of many actually, actually attention-grabbing issues that we’re seeing is that we’re simply getting super efficiency from open supply fashions particularly for Pinterest use instances on visible AI,” Prepared instructed buyers. “Given present market charges and per token prices, in early testing, we’re seeing orders of magnitude discount in value with comparable efficiency utilizing fine-tuned open supply fashions versus main off-the-shelf proprietary fashions.”

He stated the corporate deliberate to maneuver ahead with many open-source fashions for its varied use instances, which might come at “a fraction of the associated fee” of the bigger mannequin suppliers.

“We really feel actually good in regards to the worth that we’re bringing to the person there, our potential to align that with monetization, and our potential to regulate these prices and ship that successfully,” stated Prepared.

The exec additionally touched on different areas the place Pinterest is contemplating greatest use AI, together with agentic buying. Prepared stated that Pinterest already affords “push-button sort shopping for” through its Amazon partnership, and it’ll wait to see if customers really need the AI to “push the button for them.”

Within the meantime, Prepared instructed that Pinterest’s largest differentiator is that it guides the person by the buying expertise — one thing it hopes to enhance with Pinterest Assistant, an AI companion customers can speak to, asking for recommendation and suggestions. The assistant understands the person primarily based on their boards, collages, saves, and the way they examine to folks with comparable tastes, the corporate says.

Pinterest can also be rolling out customized boards curated with AI, which Prepared stated mix professional human curation and AI.