Pinterest Launches AI Marketing Suite at Cannes 2026: Business Assistant, MCP, and Ask Pinterest

As generative AI reshapes how consumers discover products, Pinterest is betting that context and taste beat keywords. At Cannes Lions 2026, the company unveiled a suite of AI tools designed to give marketers deeper integration, smarter creative automation, and a window into the next era of conversational shopping.

What Pinterest Announced

Business Assistant is an AI collaborator embedded in Ads Manager and mobile, currently in closed beta in the US. Unlike text-heavy chatbots, it is visual by design — displaying trend graphs and top-performing Pins alongside its recommendations. For example, if searches for "clean beauty routine" spike 42% in a week, Business Assistant can surface that trend with supporting data and suggest which Pins an advertiser should promote.

Pinterest MCP (Model Context Protocol) connects Pinterest’s platform data — campaign performance, keyword insights, trend signals — directly into the agentic workflows and copilots advertisers already use. Alpha partners include PMG, Pacvue, Dentsu, Havas, Innovid by Mediaocean, and Omnicom’s Jump450. “Pinterest MCP helps us integrate Pinterest directly into the workflows our teams are already building,” said Chris Ivey, President of Jump450.

Performance+ creative capabilities expand Pinterest’s AI-generated creative tooling for advertisers, building on its existing Performance+ suite.

Ask Pinterest is a limited-access app that extends Pinterest’s Taste Graph beyond the main app into conversational, multi-step shopping experiences. Rather than a single search query, users can ask complex questions — like furnishing a room over time or planning a budget dinner party — and receive personalized, context-aware recommendations that persist across sessions.

Key Takeaways

• Pinterest is opening its proprietary taste and intent signals to third-party marketing platforms via MCP, turning platform insights into fuel for external AI workflows.
• Business Assistant brings visual AI into the advertiser workflow — a design choice that distinguishes it from text-first copilots in the market.
• Ask Pinterest signals Pinterest’s ambition to compete in conversational commerce alongside ChatGPT shopping integrations and Google’s AI Overviews.

“The future of discovery won’t be driven by keywords alone. It will be shaped by context, taste, and trusted recommendations,” said Lee Brown, Chief Business Officer at Pinterest.

Read the full article on Pinterest Newsroom.