Pinterest CEO: AI Shopping Push Drives Gen Z Growth, Ad Gains

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said the company has evolved from a visual discovery and browsing platform into what he described as an AI-driven shopping assistant serving more than 640 million users. Speaking at a conference fireside chat, Ready said the company’s efforts to make the platform more actionable have supported double-digit user growth, higher engagement and an expanding performance advertising business. Ready said more than half of Pinterest users now come to the platform to shop, while Gen Z has become its largest and fastest-growing user cohort and represents more than half of users. He cited an Adobe study indicating that 39% of Gen Z consumers view Pinterest as the first place they go to search, while 71% see it as more personalized than other search destinations. Pinterest Pins a Profit Play To Its Mood Board “Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop,” Ready said, adding that the platform’s recommendations are supported by data created through users’ curation of visual content, style and preferences. Shopping and Advertising Progress Ready said Pinterest has shifted substantially toward lower-funnel advertising since he joined the company four years ago. The platform was previously “almost entirely” focused on upper-funnel ads, he said, while more than two-thirds of its business is now lower-funnel performance advertising. Pinterest has also generated more than five times as many clicks to advertisers over the past three years, according to Ready. Analysts Love These 3 Stocks Trading Near 52-Week Lows—Here’s Why He said the company has made particular monetization progress in the U.S. and Canada, or UCAN, while international markets remain a larger opportunity. More than 80% of Pinterest’s users are outside the U.S., Ready said, but those markets account for roughly 20% of monetization. The CEO also disclosed that U.S. average revenue per user for Gen Z is now roughly consistent with the ARPU of millennials. He said Gen Z users have the platform’s deepest engagement and highest retention, and argued that their purchasing power should increase as the cohort matures. Ready said Pinterest Performance+, the company’s AI-driven advertising platform, reached general availability at the beginning of last year. About 30% of Pinterest’s lower-funnel revenue now runs through Performance+, he said. The product is designed to reduce the work required for advertisers to create campaigns while using AI to optimize where and how ads reach users across the purchasing journey. Ready said advertisers using multiple objectives across the funnel h...