Pinterest is cutting 780 employees, 15% of its workforce, as it pursues an "AI-forward strategy." The social media platform is reallocating resources from traditional engineering and operations roles to AI-focused teams building recommendation and ad-targeting systems.
Pinterest has always been a visual discovery platform, and AI-powered recommendations are genuinely central to its product. But cutting 15% of the workforce to fund AI teams suggests the company was significantly overstaffed for its current revenue, or that it is making a calculated bet that AI can replace a large portion of its human-powered operations.