Pinterest cuts workforce by around 15 percent to focus on AI

Pinterest is planning to lay off hundreds of workers and reduce its office space to reallocate resources for its artificial intelligence initiatives. In a regulatory filing posted Tuesday, Pinterest says the reduction is expected to impact “less than 15 percent” of its current workforce, and that the layoffs should be complete by September 30th, 2026.

Pinterest said it had 4,666 full-time employees as of the end of 2024, which would mean around 700 staffers are impacted by today’s announcement. The document said these changes are to support three “transformation initiatives,” with two of them connected to AI:

Off the back of these changes, Pinterest is set to incur pre-tax restructuring charges of approximately $35 million to $45 million.

We have reached out to Pinterest for comment.

The deluge of AI-generated content on Pinterest has been criticized by users — enough so to prompt the company into making features that detect AI images and see less of it in feeds — but that hasn’t deterred Pinterest from injecting the technology across its platform. In October, it released an AI Pinterest Shopping assistant that provides personalized recommendations. The following month, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said that “our investments in AI and product innovation are paying off,” and that the platform had effectively become “an AI-powered shopping assistant for 600 million consumers.”