What does it take to bring a burned-out founder back to the company he sold to Amazon? For Jamie Siminoff of the video doorbell maker Ring, it was the potential of AI — and the Palisades fires that destroyed his garage, the birthplace of Ring itself.

Siminoff’s vision: turn Ring from a video doorbell company into an AI-powered “intelligent assistant” for the entire home and beyond. A handful of new features that advance that goal shipped just ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, including fire alerts, alerts about “unusual events,” conversational AI, facial recognition features, and more. Some of these additions have not been without controversy, as consumers have to grapple with how much privacy they’re giving up in favor of convenience and security. But together, they point to Ring’s latest phase of its business.

“Turn AI backwards — it’s IA, it’s an intelligent assistant,” Siminoff explained in 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 running at full throttle for so long that he needed out. “I built the company in my garage…I was there for all of it. We then get to Amazon, and I go even faster — like, more throttle,” Siminoff told TechCrunch. “I didn’t get to Amazon and say, ‘I’m an exited entrepreneur, I’ll just chill out,’” he adds. “I blasted the f**king gas.”

When he later decided to depart the retail giant, he said it was because it felt like the time was right — Ring had delivered its products and was profitable. AI’s advances soon had him rethinking his plans.

Though Siminoff could have done anything, he wasn’t motivated to start something new because the things he was most excited about were those he wanted to build on Ring’s 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 adds, referring to the devastating Palisades Fires that impacted Siminoff’s neighbors and burned the back of his house, destroying the garage where Ring was built.

One of Ring’s new additions, Fire Watch, was inspired by this tragedy. In partnership with the nonprofit fire monitoring organization Watch Duty, Ring customers will be able to opt in to share footage when a massive fire event happens, allowing the organization to build a better map that can be used to help deploy firefighting resources more efficiently. The AI will be used in that case to look for smoke, fire, embers, and more in the shared footage.

Another recently launched AI feature, Search Party, also aims to solve real-world problems as it helps people find their lost pets. That feature is now reuniting one family per day with their dogs — a rate higher than Siminoff expected.

“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 admits. The AI, a sort of “facial recognition for dogs,” tries matching a posted image of a lost pet with Ring footage, which users opt into sharing if they get an alert about a possible match.

Other moves, however, have raised concerns, particularly those that saw the company forging deals with law enforcement. In 2024, Ring ended an earlier set of police partnerships that allowed police to request footage from Ring owners after some customer backlash. But this year, the company moved forward with new deals with companies like Flock Safety and Axon, which reintroduced tools that again allow law enforcement to request images and videos from Ring’s customers.

Siminoff defends the company’s decisions in this space, saying that customers can choose whether or not they want to share their Ring footage.

“The requesting agency doesn’t even know that they asked you,” he says. That is, if police are looking for someone who’s been breaking into cars in a certain geographic area, the alert will go out, and customers can respond if they choose. If customers decline, it’s anonymous.

He also points to the Brown University shooting in December. A combination of surveillance cameras — including Ring’s, Siminoff claims, helped to find the mass 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,” the founder says. “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 capture of the shooting suspect, there are still worries about what the mounting collection of data from private customers means for the landscape of the country. Plus, some are concerned that the data could be misused to go after anyone the government decides to target.

Another AI feature, “Familiar Faces,” has also received pushback from the consumer protection organization EFF, along with a U.S. senator.

The facial recognition feature uses AI to allow Ring to identify and store the faces of people who come in and out of the home on a regular basis, including their names, if provided. This way, you could get an alert that “mom” is at the front door, or that the babysitter arrived, or the kids are home from school, for instance. The feature could also be used to help disable alerts about people whose comings and goings don’t need to be watched closely.

Siminoff defends this, too, as a way for Ring to become more personalized to its users and customize the software to adapt to the unique “fingerprint” of their house. That way, the customer has to interact less with Ring’s products, unless it’s something that requires attention.

He argues that this addition builds on trust with Ring’s customers, rather than undermining 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 says. “Anyone — and I would respect it — would take their camera off of their home if they felt like we were violating their privacy.”

But with Ring’s expansion into commercial camera systems, including mounted cameras, a line of sensors, and a solar-powered trailer, also introduced just ahead of CES, the company’s customer base won’t just be neighbors protecting their homes but also businesses, job sites, campuses, festivals, parking lots, and everywhere else.