Power Players

Rick Smith on making the bullet obsolete

Rick Smith· Founder & CEO of Axon Enterprise at Axon Enterprise
·~24 min·English·Yahoo Finance
RoboticsAI CompanyPolicy
TL;DR

Axon's founder is re-engineering lethal force out of public safety: close the reliability gap between a Taser and a gun, then hand the trigger to AI-targeted drones that are paid for by business and operated by police.

01The North Star

Make the Bullet Obsolete

Smith treats gun violence as an engineering problem, not only a moral one — if a phaser existed, no one would choose bullets, so Axon's entire mission is to build that phaser.

If we had Captain Kirk's phaser, who would choose to shoot bullets at people anymore?

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
The reframe is the whole strategy. By casting lethality as a temporary limitation of the tools rather than a fact of policing, every product becomes one step on a roadmap with a definite finish line — a framing that also licenses far more R&D risk than a normal hardware company would tolerate.
02The Target Spec

Cops Don't Want Lethal — They Want Reliable

Police carry guns for reliability, not for lethality — so a Taser only replaces the gun once it stops a person as dependably as a bullet does.

when police use lethal force, they don't use it because it's lethal. They use it because it's reliable.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
This inverts the usual gun-control framing. If lethality is a side effect cops tolerate for the sake of reliability, then a non-lethal weapon that matches a gun's reliability asks no one to give anything up — it wins on the exact metric police already optimize for. Which is why the Apollo cartridge's heavy-clothing failure, not any ethical debate, is the real gate.
03The Pivot

A Weapon Company That Became a Software Company

In 2008 Axon bet the company on body cameras and the cloud, turning an electric-weapons maker into a data platform years before Wall Street believed a weapon company could.

When in history has a weapon company become a software company?

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
The cloud bet is what makes today's AI story possible. Body cameras created a river of footage no human could ever watch — which is precisely the condition under which AI stops being a feature and becomes the only way to use the data at all. The hardware pivot quietly pre-built the moat for the software business.
04The Product Vision

Take the Human Out of the Gunfight

Smith's answer to the active shooter is to stop sending people into gunfights — deploy an AI-targeted drone that incapacitates the shooter so no officer has to be in the room.

don't get in a gunfight. Send in a drone or a ground robot, and we can remotely incapacitate people.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
Watch the honesty gap Smith volunteers: the drone that can put an effect on a person does not exist yet — today's units only observe and distract. The vision is sold as inevitable, but the load-bearing piece is a reliable, safe, remote incapacitation payload — the same reliability problem from the target spec, now airborne.
05The Funding Flywheel

Operated by Police, Paid by the Private Sector

Smith thinks businesses, not police budgets, will fund public-safety drones — the private sector buys and hosts the hardware, but a sworn officer pulls the trigger.

it's not going to make sense to show up anywhere with a gun anymore because you'll be detected and stopped by small autonomous robotic systems operated by police, but paid for by the private sector.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
This split — private money, public trigger — is Smith's escape hatch from the liability trap he names himself: businesses want protection but don't want their own employees firing a Taser drone, and society doesn't want them to either. Routing the trigger to a sworn officer converts a corporate-liability nightmare into a billable public-safety service, which is exactly why he thinks the private sector, not police budgets, unlocks the market.
06The Drone Arms Race

The Biggest Safety Challenge Is Other Drones

Axon has assembled a counter-drone stack — Dedrone to detect, partner interceptors to take drones down, Fusus to fuse every camera — betting the drone threat is the world's biggest safety problem right now.

drones are probably the biggest safety challenge in the world right now.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
Smith's tell is the line 'if we can't build the best system, we'll go find a partner and connect them in.' Axon isn't betting it will win every drone-hardware race; it's betting the durable moat is the integration layer — the connected dome that fuses sensors, cameras, and third-party interceptors. Own the dashboard, rent the drones.
07Values & Humility

The One Thing Axon Won't Build

Axon will not build intentionally lethal drones — and Smith holds that line even after his own book predicting the end of war was proven catastrophically wrong, leaving the lethal drones to Anduril and others.

We will not make intentionally lethal drones.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
The humility is doing strategic work. By openly conceding his end-of-war prediction was catastrophically wrong, Smith earns the credibility to draw a line he can actually hold — admitting democracies need lethal drones (so he isn't naive) while refusing to be the one who builds them (so the brand stays 'the non-lethal company'). It reads as principle and positioning at once.
08The AI Transformation

AI Is Now the Core — So Accountability Has to Be Too

AI is now the core of Axon's business because no human can watch millions of camera feeds — which turns the surveillance-Orwell risk into something Smith has to engineer against, not wish away.

where AI is at the core of our business now, because you can imagine, there's not enough people to watch all those cameras.

— Rick Smith, Power Players
Key Insight
Smith frames accountability as a business strategy, not a concession. Usage logs and cameras-that-watch-the-cameras are, in his telling, how you 'build a long-term business' whose products survive 50 years without stepping on a landmine. The pitch to investors and the pitch to civil libertarians are, deliberately, the same pitch: durable trust is the asset.