Deep Dive
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Matt Miller here in the, uh,
Bloomberg, is it? Are we in the Bloomberg? No, the Bloomberg Businessweek studio. Sometimes I get lost. I don't know. It's a big building, right? We have 29 floors here. I'm here with Emily Grafeo. 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 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. And obviously, nobody wants fatalities. So what kind of equipment are you providing to these law enforcement officers to deal with with unrest?
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 that your brain sends to your muscles. And that's what causes your muscles to tense up.
After five seconds, it's over and the police take you into custody. And so, you know, in greater L.A., all of those departments were proud to be their partner in deploying less lethal tools to them. And they have those the tools, you know, to hopefully safely de-escalate some of what's going on. 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 L.A.?
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 applications for these. Generally, when you have any kind of physical threat to the officer or someone holding a knife or sometimes even something more deadly than that, there's very clear established use cases for
using a taser. So we're 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. I will say that I have tased myself on a few occasions. Yeah, I can't relate to that. I have to say that. 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. And I never actually ended up using it on anyone else, but I'm still here to talk about it. So, Josh, I wonder 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, right?
Have you thought about I mean, I'm sure you've thought about have you started to develop tools like that?
Yeah, so right now we do have a lot of AI functionality built into our products and our cameras. I think the tool we 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 and suggest a first draft of the police report to the officer. 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 50% to 20%. 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 and so um our our early ai tools are much more focused on productivity such that officers can do what they do best at more often uh but
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 AI products at the edge start to make their way into the body cameras. I think first it'll probably be license plate recognition, but over the longer term, once we can prove that these facial recognition models are rid of inherent bias,
That's when I think we end up launching a product like that. You know, Josh, the ACLU has already brought up concerns about the bias inherent in AI, the hallucinations that AI is capable of and that.
I think, has issued complaints about use of AI and your software to draft 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?
No, I wouldn't put it that way. And look, you know, before I get to kind of the process we run, I think it's reasonable to expect like the ACLU is never going to be doing cart 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, you know, our approach to this is something called AI.
our EEAC, which is our Equity and Ethics Advisory Coalition. And this is a group internal to Axon 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 ACLU does. And they're part of our product development process. So we have gates online.
along our product development where we check back in and do a full product deep dive with our EAC. And they ask those questions and they want to see it demonstrated that these models are rid of, of, of bias and so forth. And that's been a very, very, um,
productive relationship for us with our EAC. And it 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 little more about this on Axon.com. It's called our responsible innovation framework. And it's on there and you can see exactly how we think about some of those issues. 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 specifically are they looking for?
We do sell a consumer Taser device, 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, 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. Ultimately, our core market is police, and we wouldn't want it any other way. We're
We're honored to work with police and we think our products just have such great product market fit in that market. But in consumers where folks don't want to carry a gun and they're looking for other alternatives that can protect them but not in a lethal fashion, I think the Taser is a viable alternative. So we're excited to talk more about that in the coming years as we launch some new products in that space.
This is what the market used to sound like.
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