How Taser Is Morphing Into An AI-Big Data Company

The company’s original product became immensely successful – it’s now used by 600,000 law enforcement personnel worldwide – despite running into an onslaught of criticism that CEO and co-founder Rick Smith says they didn’t expect.  (“We thought our biggest fan was going to be Amnesty International,” he says. “And they became our biggest enemy.”) What Smith calls the company’s Act II has been police body cameras, originally added to the Taser product as a way to fend off charges of abuse, and it too has been successful: Taser, renamed Axon Enterprise, has become the number one source for the body cameras, supplying about half the major departments in the United States. Now the company is well into yet another iteration. Body cameras generate data, petabytes of it, and the concept is to use some of that data to create what Smith calls a “public-safety nervous system.” It’s a concept that has some critics nervous.