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.

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.