Dive Brief:
- Pinterest is expanding its partnership with Amazon Web Services to improve its visual search features, the company said in a June 4 announcement. The two companies have worked together since 2010.
- Pinterest inked a $4 billion deal, the largest in its history, with Amazon to use the company’s cloud services through 2031. The deal is expected to “accelerate the company’s AI roadmap,” per Pinterest.
- The agreement will provide a more responsive search and shopping experience and modernize the infrastructure powering Pinterest’s visual search platform.
Dive Insight:
Pinterest is heavily investing in AI with the objective to “make discovery more personal, visual and actionable,” for the hundreds of millions of users that come to its platform monthly, according to CTO Matt Madrigal.
The AWS agreement will support Pinterest’s next phase of growth across AI model training, inference and technological infrastructure.
The results from the partnership will improve Pinterest’s customer experience and advertiser performance, Madrigal said.
“This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision for the next generation of visual discovery on Pinterest,” Madrigal said in a statement.
Pinterest has “become an AI-enabled shopping assistant,” CEO Bill Ready said last summer. The company promised to devote more resources toward the technology and, in January, said it would reduce its workforce by around 15% and allot additional resources to AI-centered roles and teams, AI-powered products and features, and to shifting its sales and go-to-market strategy.
As Pinterest beefs up its visual search tools with Amazon’s help, the online retailer is also turning its attention toward visual search. The e-commerce titan in June rolled out its AI image generator in the Amazon Shopping app, which produces product images based on shoppers’ descriptions to help them locate similar items.
