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About the author
Jon Jacobson, MBA
Jon has worked both sides of an investigative practice: the surveillance van and the profit-and-loss statement. Twenty years of casework taught him that most agencies do not fail on skill; they stall on documentation load.
The workflows in this book come from his own casework across Arizona, California and Florida, and every one follows the verification standard in Chapter 3. Nothing in it hands your judgment to a machine.
Track record
How the manual came to exist
1997
Honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps and moved to San Francisco.
2001
Founded a skip tracing and judgment recovery agency near Silicon Valley, locating people and collecting on judgments for clients.
2001–2022
Built and ran multiple licensed investigative agencies across California and Florida. Always tired, never quite making the money the work should have paid. Plenty of motion, not enough traction.
2022
Watching his wife work through a demanding graduate program, one question changed everything: could AI read and summarize her assigned coursework, so she didn't have to spend countless hours doing it herself? The first ethical question came just as fast: what does academic integrity mean when AI is involved? Ethics has driven the approach ever since.
2022–2024
Spent two years learning, largely the hard way, how to actually integrate AI into casework and business operations. In 2024, moved to Arizona and founded Old Pueblo Investigations to put what he'd learned into practice.
2025
After building AI-assisted systems that held up in real casework, saw how much the rest of the industry was missing and began writing the manuscript that became The AI-Powered Private Investigator.
2026
Completed an MBA at Walden University, adding to a Bachelor of Social Work also earned there, and finished and published the book the same year.
Today
Trains agency owners on AI-assisted case integration that holds up to the legal and ethical scrutiny of cross-examination and courts, and how to make more money and more free time doing it.