Scott Jones: Building Identity Verification at Billion-Scale | Vision AI & Digital Sovereignty

In this episode of “the Executives,” Majid welcomes Scott Jones, VP of Product at Realeyes, the pioneering Vision AI company building revolutionary platform technology for human measurement of attention, emotion, and identity. The discussion traces Scott’s journey from economics and film student to analyst, and eventually to a patent-holding product leader who built a mid-seven-figure ARR identity solution from zero to one in just 18 months.

Scott shares insights into how Realeyes built the world’s largest ethically-sourced face dataset across 93 countries with GDPR-compliant consent, and why this matters for creating fair, unbiased AI models. He discusses the massive white space in identity verification between broken solutions like CAPTCHA and heavyweight KYC checks, and how his team created a category-defining “Better CAPTCHA” that validates personhood, uniqueness, and demographics in seconds for cents.

The conversation explores the technical and regulatory challenges of scaling to billions of identity verifications per month for a major tech customer, and Scott’s vision for digital sovereignty, where users can prove who they are without revealing who they are using zero-knowledge-proof biometrics. He reflects on why product management is more art than science, the misconceptions around AI being synonymous with LLMs, and how no-code tools are empowering faster product validation.

As a Dream Cymbals artist who’s been perfecting his craft as a professional drummer for over 30 years, Scott also discusses the unexpected ways creativity, technology, and spirituality intersect in his life, and shares a story about mind games in jazz that mirrors tactics he’s seen from tech executives.