Axon Mandates AI Use for R&D Staff as Surveillance Tools Face Growing Scrutiny

Axon Enterprise, the company behind Taser devices and police body cameras, is pushing its research and development workforce to adopt artificial intelligence aggressively, setting mandatory productivity targets even as its surveillance and AI products face mounting public criticism.

Jeff Kunins, Axon's chief product officer and chief technology officer, said every team has a 10% mandatory target for productivity gains, meaning baseline resources for advancing new features and products will be reduced. Teams that accelerate those gains by more than 15% will receive stock grants, provided the broader team meets the 10% minimum threshold. Kunins said the company expects to compress work across product management, design, and software engineering by 25% to 30% by the end of 2026, requiring less labor and organizational capacity than projects developed without AI.

"We're expecting to yield about 25%-ish acceleration, not just of the coding part, but of the entire person effort going into these features," Kunins said. The assertive push covers Axon's research and development team, which totals about 2,200 employees. Internally, Kunins has encouraged collaboration between engineering and the broader employee base through hackathon training sessions, while the IT department customizes AI features from vendors including Workday and Salesforce to automate workflows.

The mandate comes as Axon's expansion into AI and surveillance technology draws escalating criticism. Police officers have been fired or charged with using Flock Safety's AI-enabled cameras to stalk former romantic partners and other personal connections. AI systems erroneously led to the arrest of a man accused of trying to lure a child from a McDonald's in 2023, and more recently led to a Florida woman spending two weeks in jail after being wrongly accused in a deadly hit-and-run incident. Most public ire has centered on Flock, but Axon has also faced criticism that its AI tools for writing police reports make errors, though the company said this occurred during an early access period when agencies could provide feedback before broader launch. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Council voted to delay a pilot program with Axon that would have attached AI-enabled license plate readers on streetlights.

Axon was founded as Taser International by Rick Smith in an Arizona garage in 1993. The company has sold more than one million Taser devices and diversified into body cameras, drones, and license plate reader cameras for law enforcement, emergency responders, and private-sector security customers. Its AI push has helped it report ten consecutive quarters of revenue growth above 30%.

In August, Smith acknowledged a budding anti-surveillance movement that echoed the backlash following the release of Tasers. "Any new technology in public safety is going to go through an adjustment period, and I would say the critics aren't all wrong," Smith told investors during the company's second-quarter earnings presentation. Kunins described the public discourse around surveillance and AI as a complex issue requiring a nuanced conversation. "I am personally a life-long, die-hard progressive, and I'm here because of that, not in spite of it," he said. "We view our work as using technology to improve transparency and accountability on both sides…and our role is to build the tech that facilitates public safety."

Kunins said a third-party independent group called the Ethics and Equity Advisory Council makes recommendations during product design and development. When Axon developed Draft One, which uses generative AI to turn body camera audio into a first draft of a police report, there were instances where the AI-generated transcript introduced bias based on a subject's ethnicity. The large language models generated text saying a white subject "left the scene," while a Black person "fled the scene," even when all other factors were identical. "Obviously, that's a flagrant example of inappropriate bias coming out of the models solely because of the description of the skin color of the person," Kunins said. Axon fine-tuned the models to ensure outputs were more consistent and did not introduce harmful bias.

Other deployed AI tools include Axon Assistant, which can translate more than 50 languages and dialects spoken within body camera audio, allowing officers to communicate in the field without a human interpreter. For nearly a decade, Axon has also used AI to help police departments redact data from camera footage, blurring faces of bystanders, license plates, and other sensitive details not involved in an active case. Previously, a law enforcement employee would need to manually go through every frame of a video to obscure those personal details before footage could be shared with lawyers, the press, and the public.

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Delaney Sawyer

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Delaney Sawyer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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