:format(webp)){kind=logo}
Stay connected
Get the latest episode delivered to your inbox.
Episode One: Mike Shore, SVP & GM of Enterprise at Axon
Episode One: Mike Shore, SVP & GM of Enterprise at Axon
Episode synopsis
In this episode of the Safer Shift podcast, Mike Shore, Senior VP and GM of the Enterprise team at Axon, shares insights into the company’s mission to protect lives through innovative security solutions. He discusses how the Enterprise team expanded its focus to private industries like retail, healthcare, and logistics in response to growing safety challenges since 2020.
Video transcript
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Welcome to A Safer Shift, a talk series focused on creating safer communities, featuring the key leaders that will help us get there. My name is Blake Lewkowitz, and I'm joined today with Mike Shore, Senior Vice President and GM of the Enterprise team at Axon. Welcome, Mike.
Mike Shore - Axon: Thanks, Blake, thanks for having me. Great shirt.
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Of course. Glad we could match today. Thank you again for joining us. To kick us off here before we get into what you're doing today with Enterprise, can you walk us through what attracted you to Axon? What missions really stood out, and why you initially joined the team?
Mike Shore - Axon: Yeah, thanks for asking. So, I'm coming up on nine years now. And you know, when I first joined in 2015, it looked a little different; it was called Taser. And you know, the unfortunate events in Ferguson, Missouri had just occurred. And, you know, I looked at the opportunity to do something that really mattered. I was in technology in the Bay Area and had this opportunity that I was super excited about, something I could be passionate about for a long time. And you know, it's exceeded sort of every expectation I could have had at that time.
It's a couple of things. One, it's the mission—protect life. You know, it's a really big mission that also attracts the right people. And so two is the people you’re around. And three, you know, Rick talks about it like stakeholder capitalism—do well by doing good. I didn't quite appreciate everything that that meant when I first joined. But, you know, what I've realized now is we've got this big mission to protect life. And, you know, if you deliver on that, that's a whole lot of value you're delivering to society. Society will reward you and pay you for that. We're a for-profit company. And I say that in that we reinvest to continue to execute on that mission. And by being a for-profit company, and by having a defensible and growing business model, we're able to execute on that mission. And so, you know, I'm more excited than ever about where we are at Axon. Super fortunate to be here and be a part of the team, and, you know, get to wake up and go to work every day on something I really believe in.
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Very well said. Pivoting slightly, so for those that don't know, can you kind of explain what the Enterprise team does at Axon and what you've seen in terms of growth over the last few years with this team?
Mike Shore - Axon: Sure. Yeah, so Enterprise got started in, you know, 2020, really. You know, the world changed then with COVID. I like to say just simply, people stopped following the rules. You know, there's a lot to that, of course. There are socioeconomic conditions, inflation, inequality, basic distrust of institutions, and that trend, you know, really accelerated in the past couple of years. You think about how quickly the world's changed.
At the time, we were primarily serving public safety and have expanded over the years in terms of products and markets. So on the product side, things like in-car video and drones, software applications, and AI-enabled applications. On the market side, we expanded internationally and into Federal markets. In 2020, we started to get a lot more inquiries from private organizations, particularly retail, healthcare, logistics, critical infrastructure, and events venues. They were just having a lot of challenges—not only an uptick in incidents but the severity of violence in those incidents—something that is really a challenge we haven't faced before at a societal level, you know, at this scale. And it's not just the U.S.—it's globally.
We started to get inquiries like, "Hey, Axon, you've seen some of these challenges before, like frontline violence. Can you help?" And we did what we always do at Axon, which is, we spent a ton of time with our customers, got to understand their pain points, and started to adapt our solutions and build specifically for these folks. I think we're well on our way to really making a dent in these safety and security challenges.
We've got a tremendous product portfolio that we're continuing to invest in and get closer to these industries, on top of what I believe to be the most powerful safety and security network globally. By bringing those capabilities to these private organizations, not only are we going to see the benefits and outputs for communities and stores, but you're also going to see law enforcement collaborating with private companies a lot more closely, a lot more easily. Our job as technologists is to package some really complex and exciting technology and make it easy and simple to use in these environments.
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Absolutely. Very interesting pivot for Axon. For these specific industries that the Enterprise team serves, are there any stats or facts that you've found completely shocking? And then further, where do you think Axon's technology plays a role in stopping those trends and creating the safer communities we all deserve?
Mike Shore - Axon: Yeah. Well, I'd say, one, on the severity of the crisis and stats that really keep top of mind, you know, we've got a company moonshot goal to reduce deaths between the police and the public by 50% over the next 10 years. And I want to say, about 1,300 deaths in that definition last year. In retail, globally, you had 683 fatalities. And so, more than half of that tragic stat, you're finding in retail settings. There's a big challenge to solve. These are people going to work, people going shopping, and you should be able to have the decency and civility to do that without fearing for your life.
On the flip side, of our ability to impact that, we're thrilled about the results we're seeing. Retailers are seeing successful de-escalations measured in half of incidents, the number of incidents being reduced by half. We're seeing very positive employee favorability scores in terms of this making them feel safer, as well as shoppers. A lot of the trends we saw with early body cameras in law enforcement—better behavior on both sides of the camera, incidents going down—we're seeing in these settings. That’s something we're really excited about and are going to continue to invest in.
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Awesome. So what would you say is next for the Enterprise team, and if you want to go broader strokes, for Axon?
Mike Shore - Axon: Yeah, yeah, I’m really excited about some of our recent corporate development activity. In particular, the acquisitions of Fusus and Dedrone, I think, have really opened up the opportunity of the workflows that we can serve. Starting with Fusus, they provide real-time crime centers to law enforcement and have built tremendous technology to integrate any sort of sensor or input into a single pane of glass. When we were talking to our customers about that technology, they had very similar challenges—they've got disparate sensors and video systems and have a difficult time making sense of it. So, we've got a big opportunity to bring these technologies onto a single pane of glass.
What Axon’s got beyond that, and I think we're going to be able to do this better than anybody else in the world, is take any of those inputs and collaboratively and conditionally share that with law enforcement. You can imagine a world where there's an active incident triggering a number of alarms—that could be CCTV, could be your body-worn camera—real-time streaming that to your security operations center to send the right response. Taking that one step further, allowing that SOC to conditionally share to responding law enforcement with real-time situational awareness. That’s like a superpower that is mind-blowing when we bring that to our customers, on top of already being able to give them a single pane of glass. We've got the advantage of having done this in government, dealing with big legacy complex systems in a compliant way, and delivering on the promise. Now, bringing that technology to these commercial organizations is something we're super excited about, and it opens up the aperture in terms of industries that we can serve. Really, any operation where you've got video systems or sensor systems and need to get that aggregated and made sense of, Fusus could be a fit.
The second corporate development activity I mentioned was Dedrone, which I like to summarize as the antivirus of the sky. You really have the ability to do detection, identification, understanding where that flight pilot is, and in some jurisdictions, jam globally—not all, but some—malicious or unknown drone activity, which is an increasing attack vector. We've been able to secure some of the largest events in the world and critical infrastructure and data centers. It’s that exponential increase of threat vector and who’s able to serve that. I think we just added another new amazing capability to what we call the physical security operating system. Essentially, having this foundational layer of Fusus, Evidence.com, and having mentioned Auror, also excited about what they're going to be able to do with us. Then plugging in sensors over time, we've got a pretty special, comprehensive portfolio here that's bringing what we're thought of as superpowers to these private sector organizations into the 21st century.
On Auror, which I do want to mention—the leading retail crime intelligence platform—the ability to integrate with Evidence.com and easily share between platforms. They're the best in the world in terms of making sense of cases. Also, being able to do things like retail crime linking and allowing law enforcement to better collaborate with the private sector is a really exciting addition to the portfolio.
Blake Lewkowitz - Axon: Absolutely. Thanks for diving into that and for joining us today, Mike. It's been a pleasure hearing about your insights and what's next for the Enterprise team.
Mike Shore - Axon: Thanks, Blake. Great being here.