Jeff Kunins holds the titles of chief product officer and chief technology officer at Axon, but those roles only begin to describe his impact. If there were a title for the “heart and mind” of the organization, Kunins would undoubtedly earn that as well. Personable and easy to talk to, Kunins exudes a calm confidence. He speaks openly, often with his palms up – a physical gesture that reinforces his transparency and willingness to listen.
My main takeaway from our conversation at Axon Week 2025 in Phoenix was that Kunins understands the role of law enforcement officers in America today. He understands the complexities and dangers of the job. He also understands the always-precarious relationship between the public and public safety officers. He has taken the message to communities and leaders to communicate how Axon applications work, what they will do and, just as important, what they won’t do. It is with that mindset that Kunins is careful in his description of all the abilities and power that come with Axon. It’s this balanced, community-first perspective that informs his leadership.
Axon showcased solutions designed to make public safety more efficient and effective. Emphasis was placed on decreasing time spent on calls for service, report taking, reviewing digital evidence and other administrative duties.
“I can’t wait to write that police report,” said no cop ever. Various surveys estimate that police spend 25%–40% of their time on duty writing reports. My anecdotal experience says that’s about right. Before body-worn cameras (BWCs), an officer responded to a call for service, interviewed the reporting party, witnesses and maybe the suspect, then went about documenting the incident in a notebook, later to be transcribed into a police report form. It was a tedious process that took an officer out of service for the time it took to respond, write and have the report reviewed and approved by a sergeant.
I related experiences over my career where we went through so many iterations of records management systems and computer-aided dispatch systems that did not integrate with others or had to be replaced after just a few years. It was very frustrating for everyone, including executives and managers in the agency, but more important, it affected the line officers who had to relearn new systems constantly.
I asked Kunins for his elevator speech to chiefs and sheriffs who may be reluctant to purchase new technology. “Number one is ‘I hear you, and I feel you,’” he said, “especially because I think for decades the tech industry has put so much of our energy … on many other problems I think are far less worthy than this set of problems of helping. And so, policing has been underserved by our industry, and that’s one of the things that Axon, I think, has always aspired to do so well. It’s been the single biggest focus of my work in the last 5½ years, helping scale Axon. ‘I hear you, and I feel you that that’s hard,’ especially when you have this huge fragmentation of legacy systems.
“Number two, I’d say, is ‘We are here for you, and everything we build and everything about our approach is designed to make that burden as easy as it can possibly be … in three dimensions: one, the way that technology actually works. Two, it’s our commitment to interoperability and to APIs [application programming interfaces] and integrations that really, truly make your data be your data and your choices of vendors you work with for different things be your choice.
“Number three, that consultative thing where, between our professional services team and our consultants and partners, we want to just white-glove you through that as best as we can. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be perfect. That doesn’t mean change management isn’t hard. But it means we’re committed and relentless about doing that work with you and being in the boat with you to get to the outcomes you want.”
THE AXON ECOSYSTEM
My first exposure to the concept of the Axon ecosystem was at Axon Week 2024 in Miami Beach. I came to understand it as Axon’s strategy to seamlessly integrate various technologies – creating smarter, safer and more efficient tools for both officers and communities. On stage at Axon Week 2025, Kunins joined police leadership to discuss their use of Axon’s tools and services across Axon’s ecosystem. The announcements at Axon Week highlight a growing ecosystem of innovations, organized around five key pillars — all of which deliver benefits across multiple areas.
Prevention and resolution
Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) is a concept that describes crime prevention first by the tenet that a location has to allow the ability to “see and be seen.” Cameras are one way to accomplish this goal. The idea is not to place cameras everywhere, but to be strategic and place or use cameras in areas where crime occurs frequently. Professor Tamara Herold of UNLV, a senior advisor at the National Institute of Justice, has written articles on what she terms “Place-based Crime.”
Building on an existing network of camera infrastructure, Axon has collaborated with Ring to streamline how law enforcement agencies request and receive crime-related video footage from Ring users. Although agencies may already contact individual Ring customers and ask to obtain a copy or download it from a hard drive, the alliance allows virtual contact, permission and download to Evidence.com, saving valuable time. Instead of officers going door-to-door requesting footage, agencies can now request, receive permission and retrieve video through the Axon Hub.
The community can also get involved by alerting others through the real-time Citizen app. The public can share information, photographs and video through the app to public safety partners of police, fire, EMS and other members of the public. This broadens awareness and provides first responders with valuable context in real time.
Each semester I ask my criminal justice students where they get their news and information. Of course, the vast majority obtain news and information from social media or a news app on their phones. When asked about crime, the majority say they use the Citizen app to receive crime information in real time in areas where they live, work and go to school.
Businesses can become partners with Axon and Auror, allowing uploading of digital evidence virtually to thwart organized retail theft, assaults on employees and other incidents. One striking statistic shared: 10% of individuals are responsible for 60% of overall thefts. The thefts that have gone viral on social media have gone unchecked in recent years. The prevention and deterrence aspects of using video footage to aid in identification and investigations is a definite influence in deterring such thefts.
Rather than creating a new camera network from the ground up, Axon is partnering with a broad range of trusted organizations to build the largest camera network in public safety. This approach allows for rapid expansion and increased interoperability across systems. This low-cost and efficient process makes it easy for agencies to participate.
A key pillar of this effort is “Works With Axon,” a certified partner program that connects third-party cameras – like those from Axis Communications, Bosch, InsightLPR, Verkada and Leonardo ELSAG – into a unified, real-time network through Axon Fusus. Axon’s partnership with BusPatrol, the nation’s most widely deployed school bus stop-arm enforcement system, showcases how everyday infrastructure can be transformed into powerful public safety tools. These integrations give agencies confidence that certified vendor cameras support self-service onboarding into Axon Fusus, appear on operational maps and connect into real-time workflows alongside Axon devices.
Call response
Calls for service require agencies to prioritize calls, with officers responding to in-progress, violent crimes first. The others require some type of response with a lesser sense of urgency. Depending on the size of the jurisdiction, it is not unusual for calls of all priorities to back up. The backlogged calls for service runs stress the entire system, including the officer, dispatcher and call originator.
With staffing shortages affecting 80% of agencies, drones as first responders (DFR) are filling in critical staffing gaps. Axon’s integration with Skydio drones – some operating without BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) restrictions – frees officers for other duties while providing real-time situational awareness. In essence, the drones are allowed to be programmed and fly nearly autonomously.
Axon also offers Axon Assistant, an internal artificial intelligence (AI) tool that enables real-time language translation via body-worn cameras and includes Policy Chat, which helps officers quickly reference department policies.
With volumes of an agency’s general orders, training and information bulletins and policy manuals, an officer may be unsure of particular steps in a process. The officer may then query Policy Chat to help look up a policy for clarity and guidance.
In situations that may involve a victim, witness or suspect speaking a foreign language, the officer can rely on real-time translation on their BWC to translate incoming and outgoing speech in near-real time.
Real-time investigation
Axon Lightpost cameras are easily affixed to existing streetlights in less than two minutes, as demonstrated on the main stage. Axon Outpost further expands this coverage by enabling rapid deployment of high-resolution cameras in remote or underserved areas where infrastructure is limited.
In my experience as an investigator, there was nothing more frustrating than trying to track down a crime involving a vehicle with only a partial license plate to go on. With Axon Fusus, a vehicle may be found by searching based on vehicle make, model, color and other distinct features such as body damage or even bumper stickers.
Operational efficiency
Report writing is one of the most time-consuming tasks for officers. Axon’s Draft One is an AI-powered report writing tool that creates a draft police report using BWC footage from first contact to interviews and, for some organizations, throughout the investigation. The officer reviews the report on a mobile terminal or at the station and makes the necessary changes, fills in any gaps and forwards it to their supervisor for review and approval. Once it’s approved, the officer signs and submits the report, saving hours (estimated to be up to 40% or more of the time required for a manual report) and improving accuracy.
In cases where digital video recording requires a search for key moments, the new Unlimited Smart Detection feature inside Axon Evidence allows users to scan through images of every human form that appears and detect when those humans appear in the timeline. It eliminates the tedium of an investigator scrolling through hours of unrelated video and saves time in the process.
Ethical innovation
Both public safety leaders and the public have experienced feelings ranging from skeptical to fearful about what AI can mean in the public safety realm. Police leaders will need to be convinced that the use of AI in data collection, crime tracking and assisting with police reports will be reliable and without unintended information being conjured by AI. Chiefs and sheriffs demand assurances that their personnel are gaining access to reliable information.
“This commitment to responsible innovation, again, isn’t a buzzword. It’s foundational to everything about how we build and think,” said Kunins. “The quote I started when I first came here and that Rick mentioned in his keynote is, we view our job as ‘How do we, every single day, make the right things a little bit easier and the wrong things a little bit harder?’
“We want to provide resources and information to help agencies come to their decisions about their policies and approach. And so from going all the way back to TASER energy devices and body cameras to ALPR, and now with real-time crime centers, we are actively working with our own people, some of our consulting partners and our network of consultants to help go in with agencies and help them think about the kinds of issues and thoughts [around evolving] their strategy, while making sure we’re playing our position of being advisors – but not directors – of what is right for them in their place.”
When asked how he addresses concerns from AI skeptics, both from the public and public safety leaders, Kunins said Axon’s ethical foundation is built on three pillars: trust, transparency and privacy. Its AI is designed not to replace human decision-making but to enhance it. Safeguards are in place to prevent AI from taking over in critical moments, and continual monitoring helps prevent bias or unintended consequences.
- By leveraging AI, Axon seeks to improve capabilities for law enforcement while “building tools that preserve the crucial role of human decision-making while significantly improving intervention efficiency and efficacy.”
- AI-enabled technology is safeguarded with controls “so it never removes human decision-making in critical moments.”
- Axon is mindful of the need to continually monitor AI-capable applications to ensure bias is not allowed to influence outcomes.
Kunins assured me, as he would these skeptics, that human involvement and constant vigilance ensure that AI will not create “hallucinations” where it would create rather than document facts.
In every area – from crime prevention to ethical AI – Kunins brings both technological acumen and human understanding. He doesn’t just lead innovation; he grounds it in a deep respect for the people and communities it serves.
