Pinterest on Wednesday announced a new experimental app called “Ask Pinterest” 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’s platform, and other AI ad tools.

The news comes just ahead of the adtech industry’s annual gathering at Cannes Lions, which is this year mainly focused on how AI can serve the needs of advertisers and marketers.

The “Ask Pinterest” online application gives the company another way to utilize its “Taste Graph” — its internal data mapping people to their interests and aesthetics. It will initially be available in limited access, the company said.

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.

It also arrives as AI chatbots are increasingly competing with traditional search engines for consumers’ 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.

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.

Plus, by making Ask Pinterest a standalone app, the company has a way to experiment with the technology without disrupting the main Pinterest experience.

The company explains that Ask Pinterest could work for more complex or multi-step queries that wouldn’t 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’s shopping experiences while retaining the user’s context across sessions.

Ask Pinterest can also leverage users’ own saved Pins and Boards to personalize its answers.

In time, these results will help Pinterest when building more AI-powered experiences for the company’s flagship app, the company believes.

Pinterest’s 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.

A new AI model, Performance+ creative, was also introduced globally to help advertisers pick between different ad creatives to find the one that’s 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.

In an announcement sharing the news, Pinterest’s Chief Business Officer, Lee Brown, gestured towards the changing nature of web search, remarking that, “the future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations” — an area where Pinterest feels it has a “unique advantage,” Brown said.