The AI-Powered Strategy Behind Pinterest's C-Suite Additions
Pinterest has reorganized its executive team to accelerate a clear goal: become a global destination for AI-led shopping. CEO Bill Ready appointed Lee Brown as the company's first Chief Business Officer and Claudine Cheever as Chief Marketing Officer. Both report directly to the CEO and are tasked with tightening the connection between discovery, commerce, and brand.
A commercial structure built for revenue and clarity
The new CBO role centralizes all customer-facing operations. Lee Brown now oversees global sales, advertising, partnerships, and content-bringing teams that use to operate in parallel under one owner.
Chief Content Officer Malik Ducard and Julie Towns, VP of Product Marketing & Product Operations (who leads advertising product marketing), now report into Lee. As Bill Ready put it, the move "brings together all customer-facing touch-points at a moment where we have a number of new revenue opportunities."
Lee's playbook is proven. "Whether it's Spotify, DoorDash or BuzzFeed - at all of these companies, I've turned consumer demand to strong advertising opportunities by deepening client relationships, customer operations and content partnerships," he said. His arrival follows the departure of long-time Chief Revenue Officer Bill Watkins after more than a decade at the company.
Brand and AI: make it useful, not creepy
Claudine Cheever joins from Amazon to sharpen Pinterest's narrative and expand its market messaging as the company leans further into AI-led shopping and performance advertising. Her brief: make the value proposition obvious and the experience feel human.
"We can really automate and personalise that relevance, and it will never feel creepy or weird," Claudine said. "It will feel rich and useful." Bill Ready underscored the philosophy: by tuning AI for positivity and rejecting "engagement via enragement," Pinterest can become a brand that "can make a lot more."
Claudine will also lead a new consumer marketing campaign to position Pinterest as a place to browse and buy through visual discovery-useful, action-oriented, and easy to trust.
Why this matters if you run growth, product, or brand
- Go-to-market consolidation: One accountable owner across ads, sales, content, and partnerships reduces internal friction and speeds up revenue bets.
- AI as a commercial engine: Personalization and visual search move from features to monetization levers, tied directly to advertiser outcomes.
- Trust as strategy: "Usefulness without the weird" is a clear line for AI personalization-good UX and brand safety become growth drivers, not trade-offs.
- Content-to-commerce loop: With content and ad product marketing under the same umbrella, creative supply can be tuned to shopping demand in near real time.
Momentum and market position
Gen Z now represents a larger share of Pinterest's audience, and the company has posted nine straight quarters of user growth. The platform reports more than 600 million monthly active users globally.
As Bill Ready wrote, Pinterest has been building an AI-enabled shopping destination and performance ad platform while keeping user well-being central. With Lee and Claudine in place, the company expects to extend that lead and win more market share.
What executives can borrow from this move
- Map every customer touchpoint (content, sales, partnerships, support) and give one leader P&L responsibility for the full journey.
- Set explicit guardrails for AI personalization: what data is used, what outcomes you optimize, and what experiences you won't allow.
- Tie incentives across sales, product, marketing, and content to shared revenue and trust metrics-not channel-level KPIs.
- Pair brand and performance under one narrative: "useful discovery that converts." Build campaigns and product surfaces that prove it.
- Stand up cross-functional squads for high-intent experiences (e.g., visual search to cart) with weekly experimentation targets.
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