Pinterest (PINS) Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026 summary

Platform transformation and user engagement

• Evolved from a visual discovery platform to an AI-driven shopping assistant serving over 640 million users, with Gen Z as the largest and fastest-growing cohort, now making up more than half of the user base and driving deep engagement and shopping activity.

• Over 80% of users are international, but only about 20% of monetization comes from these markets, highlighting significant future growth potential.

• Monetization has shifted from upper funnel ads to over two-thirds being lower funnel performance, with more than 5x growth in advertiser clicks over three years.

• Gen Z users in the U.S. now have ARPU roughly equal to millennials, indicating strong monetization potential as their purchasing power grows.

• The platform now supports a full-funnel experience, from discovery to purchase, with AI-driven recommendations and high commercial intent.

Leadership and organizational evolution

• Recent leadership changes include a new chief product and technology officer, new heads of product engineering for ads, infrastructure, internationalization, business, and marketing.

• The CFO search focuses on finding an operational partner experienced in managing complexity at scale, reflecting the company's expansion into multiple products and geographies.

• The team is being built for the next phase of growth, emphasizing operational rigor and readiness for increased complexity.

AI strategy and technology differentiation

• AI is central to the platform, leveraging unique human curation data to deliver highly personalized recommendations and drive user engagement.

• Uses a mix of compact, fit-for-purpose models and open source/open weight models, post-trained on proprietary data for cost-effective, secure, and effective AI deployment.

• Open source models deliver similar capabilities at less than 8% of the cost of closed models, with greater effectiveness and data security.

• AI-driven improvements have expanded margins and enabled the platform to align AI use cases with highly monetizable events.