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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 22, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

Pinterest built its own AI model called Navigator-1 to power a conversational shopping tool called the Pinterest Assistant. Users can type, speak, or upload a photo to ask for ideas — for example, describing a room style they want — and the Assistant responds with personalized product recommendations drawn from their saved content. The Assistant launched in beta for U.S. users in October 2025.

Details

Navigator-1 is a fine-tuned large language model — a type of AI that understands and generates text — built by adapting a publicly available open-source base model using approximately 150,000 synthetic training examples. Pinterest states that no actual user data or third-party copyrighted content was used in training Navigator-1 itself. The Assistant uses an agentic architecture, meaning it acts like an AI coordinator that calls on Pinterest's other systems — such as image retrieval, recommendation engines, and generative models — to assemble a response. Pinterest claims it delivers more than 30% higher relevance in shopping recommendations compared to general-purpose AI models.

Products affected

Pinterest searchPinterest shopping experiencePinterest home feed

Sources & Evidence

Company Disclosure

Company DisclosureVerified

AI at Pinterest

Pinterest Help Center

https://help.pinterest.com/en/article/ai-at-pinterest

News Article

How Pinterest’s VLM-Powered AI Assistant ‘Gets’ Your Style

Technology Magazine·Nov 2025

https://technologymagazine.com/news/how-pinterests-vlm-powered-ai-assistant-gets-your-style

News Article

Pinterest Launches AI Shopping Assistant and Gen AI Controls

PYMNTS.com·Oct 2025

https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/pinterest-launches-ai-shopping-assistant-and-gen-ai-controls

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). Pinterest: Pinterest built its own AI model called Navigator-1 to power a conversational shopping tool called the Pinterest Assistant. Users can type, speak, or upload a photo to ask for ideas — for example, describing a room style they want — and the Assistant responds with personalized product recommendations drawn from their saved content. The Assistant launched in beta for U.S. users in October 2025 (data as of 2026-03-22) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/b0d3d1c8-3bfe-46e2-b4e1-12ebe7f020d5. Accessed October 13, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/b0d3d1c8-3bfe-46e2-b4e1-12ebe7f020d5
Data as of: March 22, 2026
Last verified: March 23, 2026

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by Pinterest

OtherPinterest maintains an internal program called Responsible AI that covers three areas: building inclusive AI features (the skin tone, body type, and hair pattern tools described in Practice 21), testing its AI systems for unfair bias (using internal tools that measure whether models perform equally well across different groups of users), and developing guidelines for the safe use of generative AI. The program includes red teaming — structured attempts to find flaws or harmful outputs in AI systems before they launch.OtherPinterest is testing AI-powered upgrades to its Boards feature that go beyond simple user-organized collections. In October 2025, Pinterest launched an experiment in the U.S. and Canada where the platform automatically generates outfit ideas from a user's saved fashion Pins ("Styled for you"), creates entirely AI-curated boards based on trending styles ("Boards made for you"), and suggests related products based on what a user has already saved ("Make It Yours").OtherPinterest uses AI to identify diverse skin tones, body types, and hair patterns across billions of images on its platform, then uses those signals to ensure that search results and recommendations reflect a broader range of human appearances. Users can filter fashion search results by body type ranges, skin tone ranges, and hair patterns. The body type technology launched in September 2023, with public user filters rolling out in March 2024; skin tone ranges have been available since 2018.

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