Pinterest just announced it’s cutting up to 700 jobs by the end of September, and the reason is painfully familiar at this point. The company wants to go all-in on artificial intelligence, which apparently means less money for people and more for algorithms.
According to a regulatory filing dropped Tuesday, the layoffs will affect less than 15 percent of Pinterest’s workforce. With 4,666 full-time employees as of the end of 2024, that’s roughly 700 people getting pink slips. The company is also shrinking its office footprint because, well, why pay for space when everyone’s working remotely anyway?
The AI Pivot Tax
This restructuring isn’t cheap. Pinterest expects to shell out between $35 million and $45 million in pre-tax charges to make these changes happen. That’s a lot of money to spend on firing people, but apparently it’s worth it if you want to stay relevant in the Technology world right now.
The filing mentions three “transformation initiatives,” and two of them are AI-related. It’s the same story we’ve heard from countless tech companies over the past year. Pour resources into AI development, cut costs everywhere else, hope Wall Street likes what they see.
What This Really Means
Here’s the thing about these AI pivots. They sound great in investor presentations. Every Business wants to be an AI company now, even if their core product has nothing to do with machine learning. Pinterest built its reputation on being a visual discovery platform, a digital mood board for people planning weddings and home renovations.
Now they’re betting their future on AI features that may or may not resonate with users who just want to find recipes and DIY projects. The irony is thick. Companies are replacing human workers with AI to build AI products that are supposed to help humans. The math only works if you’re looking at quarterly earnings instead of long-term sustainability.
The September 30th deadline gives affected employees about eight months of uncertainty. That’s eight months of wondering if your job makes the cut, eight months of updating resumes just in case, eight months of watching the company pivot away from the work you’ve been doing.
Maybe Pinterest’s AI gamble pays off and they become the next big thing in visual search powered by machine learning. Or maybe they end up like every other company that gutted their workforce chasing the latest tech trend, wondering where all their institutional knowledge went when the algorithms don’t perform as promised.
