AI Impact Awards 2025: Axon is Saving Police Officers Time and Headaches

The national surveys report that the police spend a large part of their time writing reports and carrying out other administrative work. The generator of reports fueled by Axon is a winner of Newsweek IA impact price in the extraordinary impact category in the tool or commercial service for its ability to save the organizations and departments of application of the law and the services of the thousands of hours per week by rationalizing and automating the report process of the report, thus helping to fight against professional exhaustion and staff shortages within these organizations.

“They experience a ton of overtime. The officers say they have to stay late to make reports and things,” Axon’s founder and CEO Rick Smith said in Newsweek. “We force the officers to finish their work in a reasonable time and they have more time for the patrol and things like training.”

Smith said he had founded his company following a shooting where two of his friends had been killed. His plan was to make tasers a safe alternative to the possession of a firearm, with part of the mission being to protect life and make the balls obsolete. Smith shared that the Taser was controversial at the time and did not really take off as a consumer product. However, in his early years, Axon increased his clientele through police services, who sought alternatives to firearms in de -escalation situations.

To ensure that tasers and other police forms were used in a responsible manner, Axon has also settled in the body of the body camera, which precipitated a new need for cloud storage, another service began to offer. Smith believes that the servers of Axon host more video data than YouTube, but obviously they have fewer viewers.

In addition to cloud storage, Smith launched a document management product in order to ultimately automate the writing process using AI.

“We made a fairly big bet [around 10 years ago]”Said Smith.” At one point, AI could write your police report. “

Smith began to follow the futurists and attend technological conferences to see where automatic learning and generative AI are heading. He said that the release of the OPENAI GPT-4 was the moment when he felt comfortable to launch the report generator on AI, a draft. He uses information on the body camera and other recordings to help the agents with a first draft of the incident reports they need to file from their activity on the ground.

“I realized that the police spent about half of their time writing police reports,” said Smith. “It’s not really added, it’s a huge expenditure.”

Although the use of AI, in particular in the application of laws, can be controversial, Smith does not hesitate to rely on the opportunity presented by emerging technology. He shared that anxon retains an advisory council to identify and proactively solve the problems that skeptics can have.

“All we have succeeded is generally” zero to a “type type, and frankly, fairly controversial things,” said Smith. “At the beginning, the police had no interest in electric weapons, and we therefore showed them the advantages. They did not want our body cameras before Michael Brown’s shot in Ferguson.”

The more controversial uses of AI in law application include facial recognition or software that predict crimes, but Smith has said that Axon’s foray into emerging technology was to solve what is essentially a commercial problem: police officers spend less time in the field and more time to write reports, most of whom are not considered by many people.

When you use a draft for the first time, the officer Nathan Stoneking of the Lafayette police department in Indiana said: “This is probably a 25 to 30 minutes report, and you press the narrative button and it sounds something in a few seconds. There is a plethora of things that you can do with this additional hour or two hours in a period of 12 hours.”

“You automate a super expensive and very bureaucratic process. No one likes to do them. You have people who become police, it’s a terrible part of work for them,” said Smith. “They don’t really like it. It has become a meme.”

One year after the launch, Axon estimates that the draft allowed officers of more than 2 million hours in 100,000 reports. Some departments say that agents spend half the time, or less, on reporting. The Leon County Sheriff’s Bureau reports that the average time writing time has increased from 24.6 to 9.46 minutes.

“All that a cop does when seated on a computer is a version of data input or manipulation in a kind of business process,” said Smith. “We think that all these things are important to support functions. They have risks, so we must also expect to make sure that we keep humans in the loop. But these are support functions that our customers would generally like to automate as much as they can.”