ICYMI: Axon Sees an A-I Future

Axon is widely known for TASERs and body worn police cameras, and has grown into a nearly $60 billion connected software, services, and hardware platform that some analysts refer to as the ‘Apple of safety.’ The company’s newest artificial intelligence developments, including Axon Assistant, which is built directly into Axon’s latest generation of body-worn cameras, the Axon Body 4, and provides a new voice-enabled AI companion.

Josh Isner, president of Axon, discusses the impact of AI on Axon’s various product offerings and the broader demand for physical security tools.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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Speaker 2 (00:32):
Matt Miller here in the Bloomberg Are we in the
Bloomberg Business No, the Bloomberg Business Week Studio.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Sometimes I get lost, get lost. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
It's a big building, right we have twenty nine floors here.
I'm here with Emily Graffeo. We're in for Tim and Carol,
and we have with us right now Josh Isner, president
of Axon, on the latest enhancements in public safety technology.
They make Taser guns, they make body cameras, but they
make a lot more than that, going beyond hardware into

(01:02):
software as well. Josh, great to have you on the
program with us. Talk to us first about the kind
of non lethal tools that the police and I guess
National Guard have to combat rioters, if you want to
see them that way. We've heard a lot of talk
out of the White House about an insurrection in Los Angeles,

(01:22):
and obviously nobody wants fatalities. So what kind of equipment
are you providing to these law enforcement officers to deal
with unrest?

Speaker 4 (01:34):
Yeah, certainly, and we'll probably at least I will do
my best to kind of stay out of the politics
of the situation, focus on how we can keep people safe.
And ultimately that's what the taser does. It's a less
lethal tool, shoots out darts. Two of the darts connect
to your body and conduct energy at the same waves

(01:54):
that your brain sends to your muscles, and that's what
causes your muscles to tense up or five seconds it's
over and the police take you into custody. And so
you know, in Greater LA, all of those departments, we're
proud to be their partner in deploying less legal tools
to them and and they have those the tools, you know,

(02:15):
to hopefully safely de escalate some of what's going on.

Speaker 5 (02:19):
Josh, have you seen demand pick up? It's very short term,
but just in the last several days, have you seen
that demand at least coming from.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
LA Not not particularly only because the demand is already
there from all of those customers, they certainly have seen
riots like this historically, they've seen other, you know, applications
for these. Generally, when you have any kind of physical
threat to the officer or someone holding a knife, or

(02:49):
or sometimes even something you know more deadly than that,
there's there's very clear, you know, established use cases for
for using a taser. So really proud of the fact
that it didn't take something like this for our customers
to already trust us and believe that there are use
cases for our products.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
I will say that I have tased myself on a
few occages. I have to say that.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
So years ago I was in a job, like a
summer job, doing security and we had to use these tools,
and our boss said, I want you to try it
on yourself before you use it on anyone else.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
And I never actually ended up using it on anyone else,
but I'm still here to talk about it. So, Josh,
I wonder.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
About the importance of AI in the tools that you provide.
Emily and I were talking earlier about and I don't
know that we're there yet, but if you could use
AI and facial recognition, for example, on a body cam
or in smart glasses, then you'd give law enforcement officers
maybe a little bit of an advantage.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Have you thought about, I mean, I'm sure you've thought
about have you started to develop tools like that?

Speaker 4 (03:56):
Yeah, so right now we do have a lot of
AI functionality built into our products and our cameras. I
think the tool we've focused on first with the body
camera is actually offloading all the audio transcripts of the
videos that take place and letting AI analyze those in
suggest a first draft of the police report to the officer.

(04:19):
There are some sexier use cases of AI, like the
facial recognition element you mentioned, but the use case I
just mentioned literally takes the officer's administrative workload down from
fifty percent to twenty percent, and thus an officer ends
up in the street with far more of their time
days of a week that we're giving back to the officer.

(04:41):
And so our early AI tools are much more focused
on productivity such that officers can do what they do
best at more often. But I think as we build
out our next generation body cameras with more frankly battery power,
computational power, better connectivity, you'll see some of those other

(05:03):
AI products at the edge start to start there to
make their way into the body cameras. I think first
it'll probably be license plate recognition. But over the longer term,
you know, once we can prove that these speci facial
recognition models are rid of inherent bias, that's when I
think we end up, you know, launching a product like that.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
You know, Josh, the the ac LU has already brought
up concerns about the bias inherent in AI, the hallucinations
that AI is capable of, and I think has issued
complaints about use of AI and your software to draft

(05:45):
police reports. How do you respond to that, because of
course it can make mistakes and if you see a
first draft, even if you're a trained police officer, that
can also alter the way you think of what actually happened.
So is it maybe doing as much harm as it
does help?

Speaker 4 (06:05):
No, I wouldn't put it that way. And and and look,
you know, before I get to kind of the process
and we run, I think it's reasonable to expect, like
the a c l U is never going to be
doing art reels about police technology or what you know,
what police you know, products they use and so forth,
And so I do think we have to remember a
little of that And and you know. Our approach to
this is is something called our ee a C, which

(06:29):
is our Ethic Equity and Ethics Advisory Coalition, and this
is a group internal to ax On of folks that
come from the world of activism and don't see the
issues the same way that the police do and see
issues more like the a C l U does and
and they're part of our product development process. So we

(06:50):
have gates along our product development where we check back
in and do a full product deep dive with our
ee a C and they ask those questions and they
want to see it demonstrated that these models are rid
of bias and so forth. And that's been a very
very productive relationship for us with our EAC, and it

(07:12):
really does validate internally, you know, our product designs and
motivations to make sure that hey, when these things hit
the market, you know, the folks who are the most
critical voices in the room will have the data to
share with them about the process we took, you know,
to arrive at these products. And you can read a

(07:34):
little more about this on Axon dot com. It's called
our Innovative Responsible Innovation Framework and it's on there and
you can see exactly how we think about some of
those issues.

Speaker 5 (07:44):
So, Josh, your company started for primarily law enforcement. I'm
wondering if you're seeing more demand pick up from civilians,
maybe civilians worried about crime, particularly post pandemic. Have you
been seeing more civilians and what products clar are they
looking for.

Speaker 4 (08:02):
We we do sell a consumer taser device and uh
and and it has picked up since the pandemic. For sure,
It's still a relatively small part of our business. But
over the next couple of years, you know, I think
we'll be updating our product portfolio in the consumer space,
and we're really excited about the future iterations of the product.
You know, Ultimately, our core market is police and we

(08:24):
wouldn't want it any other way. Where we're honored to
work with police, and we think our products just have
such great product market bid in that market, but in
consumers where folks don't want to carry a gun and
they're looking for you know, other alternatives that are that
can protect them but not in a lethal fashion. You know,
I think the taser is a viable alternative. So so

(08:47):
we're excited to talk more about that in the coming
years as we as we launched some new products in
that space.

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