What motivates a founder who has already sold his company to Amazon to return? For Jamie Siminoff, the creator of the video doorbell company Ring, it was the transformative power of artificial intelligence—combined with the personal impact of the Palisades fires, which destroyed the very garage where Ring was born. Siminoff’s ambition is to evolve Ring from a maker of video doorbells into an AI-driven "intelligent assistant" for the home and broader environments. Several new features that support this vision were released just before this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, notifications for "unusual events," conversational AI, facial recognition capabilities, and more. While some of these additions have sparked debate over privacy trade-offs, they collectively mark a new chapter for Ring. "Turn AI backwards—it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant," Siminoff remarked during a conversation at CES last week. "We keep doing these things together that are making us smarter, and making it so that, for you, there’s less cognitive load."

By 2023, five years after selling Ring to Amazon, Siminoff had been operating at an intense pace for so long that he needed a break. "I built the company in my garage…I was there for all of it. I didn’t get to Amazon and say, ‘I’m an exited entrepreneur, I’ll just chill out,’" he added. "I blasted the f**king gas." When he later chose to leave the retail giant, he explained the timing felt right—Ring had successfully launched its products and was profitable. However, rapid advancements in AI soon made him reconsider his plans.

Although Siminoff could have pursued any venture, he felt most inspired by ideas that could be built on Ring’s existing platform. "AI comes out, and you realize, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much we could do,’" Siminoff said. "And then the fires happened," he added, referring to the devastating Palisades Fires that affected his neighbors and burned part of his home, destroying the garage where Ring originated. This tragedy directly inspired one of Ring’s new features, Fire Watch. In collaboration with the nonprofit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers can opt to share footage during major fire events, helping the organization create detailed maps to deploy firefighting resources more effectively. AI will analyze the shared footage to identify smoke, fire, embers, and other hazards.

Another recently launched AI feature, Search Party, addresses real-world problems by helping owners locate lost pets. This tool is now reuniting approximately one family per day with their dogs—a faster rate than Siminoff anticipated. "I had hoped to find one dog by the end of Q1…that was my goal. No one’s ever done anything remotely like this, and I just didn’t know how the AI would work," he admitted. The AI functions like a "facial recognition for dogs," attempting to match a posted photo of a missing pet with Ring footage that users voluntarily share if they receive an alert about a potential match.

However, other initiatives have raised concerns, particularly the company’s partnerships with law enforcement. In 2024, Ring discontinued an earlier program that allowed police to request footage from users following customer criticism. But this year, the company established new agreements with firms like Flock Safety and Axon, reintroducing tools that enable law enforcement to request images and videos from Ring customers. Siminoff defends these decisions, emphasizing that participation is optional. "The requesting agency doesn’t even know that they asked you," he explained. For example, if police are investigating a series of car break-ins in a specific area, an alert is sent to customers, who can choose whether to respond. Declines remain anonymous. He also cited the December shooting at Brown University, where he claims a network of surveillance cameras—including Ring’s—helped locate the shooter. "Scrutiny is fine…I welcome it, but I’m glad that we stood up to it, because in the Brown shooting, the police needed this," Siminoff stated. "If we had caved to people’s ‘maybe’s,’ and the scrutiny that they were giving us—[that] I don’t think is correct—the police wouldn’t have had a tool to try to help find this [shooter], and the community would not have had the ability to as easily share in what was happening and as fast."

Despite the successful apprehension of the shooting suspect, concerns persist about the implications of accumulating vast amounts of private customer data. Some worry this information could be misused to target individuals singled out by authorities. Another AI feature, "Familiar Faces," has also drawn criticism from the consumer protection organization EFF and a U.S. senator.

This facial recognition tool uses AI to identify and store the faces of regular visitors to a home, along with their names if provided. It can send alerts when "mom" arrives at the door, the babysitter comes, or the children return from school, for instance. The feature can also reduce unnecessary alerts for familiar individuals. Siminoff argues this personalization allows Ring to adapt to the unique "fingerprint" of each household, minimizing the need for user interaction unless attention is required.

He contends that such features build trust with customers rather than erode it. "Our products will not be on neighbors’ houses if they don’t trust us…. There’s no incentive for us to do something that would lose trust with our neighbors in maintaining their privacy," Siminoff said. "Anyone—and I would respect it—would take their camera off of their home if they felt like we were violating their privacy."

With Ring’s expansion into commercial camera systems—including mounted cameras, sensors, and a solar-powered trailer, also unveiled ahead of CES—the company’s reach now extends beyond homeowners to businesses, construction sites, campuses, festivals, parking lots, and various other settings.