Brad Scoggin
Welcome back to the XR Industry Leaders Podcast with ArborXR. I'm your host, Brad Scoggin, CEO and co-founder of ArborXR, along with my co-host, Will Stackable, our CMO and also a co-founder. Today, we get to sit down with Axon — a public company and global leader in public safety — and specifically with Thi Luu, the VP and GM of VR Training at Axon. Thi, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thi Luu
Thanks, Brad. Great to be here with you and Will.
Brad Scoggin
Well, let's just jump right into it. Maybe tell us a little bit about your background and your role at Axon.
Thi Luu
Sure. I've been working in technology for over 20 years, and currently, I lead our Axon VR Training team — both the product and the business. My team includes product managers, designers, engineers — all the folks building our virtual reality training.
Brad Scoggin
Well, a lot of folks probably don't know this, but Axon has one of the largest and, I think, most impressive VR deployments in the world. So tell us how VR fits into Axon’s mission — maybe start with the mission itself and how VR supports that.
Thi Luu
Sure. Axon’s mission really is to protect life and be a leader in public safety technology. We have a moonshot goal to reduce gun-related deaths between police and the public by 50% over the next 10 years.
We’re the maker of the TASER less-lethal energy weapon, body-worn cameras, and digital evidence management. We have a whole ecosystem of hardware and software products targeted toward public safety.
We really feel that VR training is core to achieving that moonshot goal. In order for officers to choose alternatives to guns — like the TASER energy weapon — they need to feel confident and well-trained on that weapon, and that’s where VR training comes in.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, we talk a lot about the benefits of training or learning in VR. We always mention things that are difficult, dangerous, or expensive — and your use case, to me, is kind of the poster child for the “difficult and dangerous” part of VR training.
What was it for you? What was that initial core problem where you said, “We want to try to solve this, and we think VR is how to do it”?
Thi Luu
Yeah, I think the main problem is just that there’s not enough time and resources for agencies to train. A lot of them are understaffed, they don’t have enough trainers, and it’s expensive to pull officers out of the field and bring them to a centralized training facility.
One of the benefits of our VR solution is that it’s highly portable and scalable. You can run it as a centralized training facility or deploy it out at precincts. By giving officers more access to training, the hope is that they can train more frequently.
Oftentimes, with their TASER energy weapons, for example, they’ll do an initial certification and then just an annual certification — but we don’t believe that’s sufficient training. We’d love for them to train more so they can feel more confident in the field when dealing with the variety of scenarios they face every day.
Will Stackable
So I know that Axon is now deploying this technology in thousands of organizations globally. How did the program start? What was the initial use case, and what are the use cases now for VR?
Thi Luu
Yeah, so Axon’s been in VR since 2019, and our leadership has been a big believer in the benefits of immersive training.
Initially, the first use case was what we call community engagement training. That’s more 360-degree video designed to train officers to handle a variety of situations ranging from mental health crises to drug overdoses to interactions with community members with disabilities.
That training helps officers build empathy and engagement for different types of situations they face in the field.
Over time, our portfolio has evolved and expanded. Today, we still have that community engagement training, but we also have what we call simulator training — which is rendered in CGI. That’s for officers to train on both TASER energy weapons as well as different use-of-force scenarios they may encounter in the field.
For TASER energy weapons, we think there’s great benefit in high-repetition, muscle-memory-type training. We’ve invested in creating our own custom VR controllers that look like true-to-life TASER energy weapons and work exactly the same, because we think it’s important for them to train with realistic equipment. That’s how they build confidence in using the weapon in the field.
That training focuses on fundamental, high-repetition drills — something that’s hard to do today because officers don’t get to practice with their TASER energy weapons as much as they do with their firearms. With VR, we’re trying to drive confidence in deploying the weapon effectively.
We also have what we call “use-of-force training scenarios.” These mimic calls that officers may face in the field, where they have to practice things like deciding what type of force to use or how to transition between different weapon types. So today, we have a wide range of training applications that officers are using.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, I think a lot about the pressure a police officer is under in a situation, right? They walk up to a car or a scene and have to be ready for anything — literally anything. And the cost of a mistake is pretty high.
To me, it’s so cool that you can put an officer in a VR training simulation again and again and again, and they can either improve — or maybe you can even determine that some people just don’t have what it takes to handle that kind of stress.
It’s just so cool. And I think there are some of those applications — some YouTube videos we could probably put in the show notes that show some of the simulations — which would be great if we can.
Thi Luu
Yeah, and again, there are a lot of different types of training that officers do. There’s new recruit training — for people brand new to policing who may have never dealt with someone experiencing a mental health crisis. That’s where that type of training helps, by giving them initial exposure to threat situations.
Once you become a police officer, there’s also annual certification training. VR gets used in those certifications.
What we really want to do, though, is drive agencies to do more frequent micro-trainings, because we feel like smaller, regular sessions lead to better retention. Instead of just doing, you know, the corporate-style annual training that we all have to do — which doesn’t stick very well — we want to democratize training and make it more accessible.
That way, officers can train more often. Maybe they have 10 minutes at the beginning of their shift, and they can pop into a headset to refresh some skills. That’s ultimately where we want to get to.
We already have some agencies doing that today, but we’re working to help them scale those programs.
Will Stackable
I’d love to hear — could you give me a day in the life? I’m a new recruit, or let’s say I’m an officer and I want to do a micro-training. I walk into the office — what does the process look like, and how do I actually get into this training?
Thi Luu
Yeah, so for new recruits, it’s a little bit different. New recruits usually go to some sort of academy for about six months, where they’re basically learning the basics of how to be a police officer. That’s more centralized training. A lot of states run police training academies for all new recruits from agencies across the state.
For example, I live in Seattle. Washington State has a training academy, and if you want to be a new police officer — even for the Seattle Police Department — you go to the state training academy.
In that training academy, that’s where you may encounter some of our communication training. You’re getting certified on your initial TASER certification. That’s more trainer-led right now, so there are trainers running classrooms, having people put on headsets and practice their skills. That’s happening at the academy level.
Once you pass the academy, you often go out into the field, and agencies will pair you with a more experienced officer, usually for your first year. That experienced officer is often referred to as an FTO — a Field Training Officer. That’s just a more seasoned police officer that you’re partnered with, and they’ll have you help engage on different types of calls.
That’s when you’re at your precinct. We have some customers — I’ll use Joliet PD as an example. They’re a large police department in Illinois, and they’ve deployed VR headsets at some of their departments. They have officers go in monthly for training.
So again, if they have time at the beginning of their shift, they’ll train. They also have a VR trainer or facilitator at that agency, because as we all probably know, VR is still not as easy to use as opening an app on your phone. That’s one of the challenges to scaling, and we’re working to make that easier.
But an officer at Joliet PD, for example, could be doing training monthly because they have an administrator at their precinct who knows how to set up VR, get them in a headset, and direct them to different types of training.
Will Stackable
That’s great. You mentioned that training in VR is ideal for things that are difficult, dangerous, or expensive to simulate in real life. You mentioned the scenario of an officer encountering somebody with mental health issues. What other types of scenarios do you feel lend themselves to VR in a unique way — things you can’t easily do with traditional training?
Thi Luu
I mean, there are so many. Just think about all the different scenarios police officers encounter every day — mental health crises, domestic violence issues, community members who have certain disabilities like Alzheimer’s, who are hard of hearing, or who don’t speak English as their first language. We have a wide variety of those types of scenarios.
We’ve also done some interactive case law scenarios, which are interesting. Case law refers to rulings in certain jurisdictions that define where it’s an appropriate use of force and where it’s not.
Typically, in the past, officers would sit through PowerPoint presentations just to understand what the case law said — “This is what you can or cannot do.” Now, we’ve started to take some of those marquee cases and create interactive training scenarios around them. That’s another interesting use case.
Beyond that, all the different use-of-force scenarios we have — these are situations officers encounter all the time. Most agency training today still looks like sitting in a classroom with an instructor going through a PowerPoint. They also do very hands-on defensive tactics training, and VR isn’t going to replace that.
They also run what they call RBTs — reality-based trainings. Sometimes they’ll have other officers act in scenarios. Even with TASER training, they’ll practice deploying on static, two-dimensional targets, but they also do drills where officers are dressed in these puffy suits — we call them HALT suits — because if they’re actually getting a training cartridge fired at them, they need protection.
But those sessions aren’t super realistic. The trainers in the HALT suits aren’t moving very quickly, and it’s been interesting to hear from our customers that some of the training we do in VR is training they’ve never really done before.
A great example is an exercise in VR called “Moving Targets.” It seems pretty simple on the surface.
Will Stackable
Interesting.
Thi Luu
It’s where you practice deploying your TASER energy weapon at moving targets. They can be running away from you, running toward you, or running across your field of view. We thought that was a pretty foundational skill — because when you see TASERs being used in the field, often the subjects aren’t just standing still; they’re moving.
A lot of our customers said, “We’ve actually never practiced deploying TASERs on moving targets,” because they’ve either practiced on two-dimensional targets or against trainers in HALT suits — but again, those aren’t moving very fast.
So that was eye-opening for us. VR can easily create scenarios that officers don’t get to practice in the real world because they’re difficult and resource-intensive to run.
Will Stackable
Interesting.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, and you make a great point. I think sometimes there’s this misnomer that because VR is so exciting and powerful, it’s going to replace all your training — and really, that’s not how it works. At its best, it’s a very powerful augmentation for certain scenarios.
I think that’s a great example. How else can you practice on a moving target again and again and again without wasting TASER cartridges or whatever the setup might be, right? I’m very curious — you touched on this briefly…
Thi Luu
Exactly.
Brad Scoggin
A minute ago, you mentioned scale — you have so many officers going through this training — and you talked a little bit about the logistics of having someone on-site to help get people set up. But what has the response been from the officers? Are they resistant? Are they excited about it? How has that played out? I think sometimes we’ve seen that the people side of change management is the hardest part. Everyone thinks it’s the tech side, and that has its challenges, but then you get to the people, and sometimes it’s a mixed bag.
Thi Luu
Yeah, that’s definitely the case here. I think, you know, change is hard for people, right? And this is still a relatively new technology, so there’s a wide mix. I will say sometimes there’s skepticism from older, more experienced officers — like, how effective really is this training? And we often hear from our trainers that even people who are initially a little bit skeptical of VR, once they get in it, they really do get immersed and start to see the benefit.
So overall, I think the reception from the trainees has been really positive. Some of our agencies even use VR in recruiting events. When they’re trying to recruit new police officers, they’ll have VR headsets there to show, especially to younger, more tech-savvy recruits — many of whom have played video games or may even own VR headsets — that their agency is leaning into new technology. “We actually use VR for training.”
So I think some of the newer officers get excited about using VR, and we’ve also won over some of the more skeptical officers too. Once they get in the headset, they really do see the value and can see how the training makes them more prepared and more confident.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, I mean, I could see that. As a new recruit, I try to put myself in their shoes — it’s an exciting profession, but it’s also a scary one. To feel like I’m going to be better prepared… there’s the fun component of doing training in VR, but there’s also the practical side of entering this profession and being more ready for what’s ahead.
It’s funny you mention the more experienced officers being resistant. One of our customers is Delta Airlines, and they do VR training for ramp activities — everything that happens around the plane. They had an older gentleman who was very resistant: “I’ve been doing this for 40 years.” He went through the VR training and came out saying, “You know what? There’s a hose I’ve been stepping over for 40 years that I’m not supposed to step over — and I didn’t know that until I did the VR training. Now every time I walk around the plane, I see that image from VR — and I never step over that hose again.”
Will Stackable
And I’ll never do it again.
Brad Scoggin
Exactly. Even with that much muscle memory, he was able to adjust his behavior. So yeah, it’s fun to see different groups respond. But I think for the most part, once people get past that initial, “I’ve got to put something on my face — what is this?” moment, most people get pretty excited about it.
Thi Luu
Yeah, again, I think it’s the immersive nature of it. It’s hard to replicate the true levels of stress you feel in real-life encounters, but we hear from a lot of trainees that it really does get their heart racing — especially in scenarios where they have to make split-second decisions. If you don’t react fast enough, even though it’s a digital character, they’re still coming at you and attacking you. So if you don’t react quickly enough…
I do think it prepares them as much as possible for some of those really stressful situations they encounter.
Will Stackable
I have a question I like to ask — and if you don’t have a specific story, that’s fine, we can cut it — but at some point in your journey, you started with a pilot and tested it out. Then there was a moment where you began scaling up, and now Axon’s at incredible scale with this technology. Was there a moment — maybe a story, a department, or a decision point — where you thought, “Okay, this is working. We need to turn the dial up on this”?
Thi Luu
Yeah, I mean, I’ll say one of our early strong adopters was Joliet PD. Their deputy chief has been really bought in, and hearing how much success they’ve had with these monthly deployments has been encouraging. They’re a very high-usage customer.
Another powerful example is from an officer in Lincoln Police Department. They’re another big user of Axon VR and have really embraced more frequent trainings. Every year, Axon gives out something called the Jack Cover Save of the Year Award. Jack Cover was the NASA scientist who first invented the TASER energy weapon technology. Each year, we recognize a police officer who successfully deescalated a situation with less-lethal force.
The winner this year was Officer Allie Winterbauer from Lincoln PD. The call she went on started as a fairly standard mental health check, but it escalated when the subject ran at her and her partners with a large knife. She was able to successfully deploy her TASER 10 — the subject was about 30 to 35 feet away — and she neutralized the threat safely. They were able to take him to a mental health facility to get help.
What was really amazing was that she had just been in VR that morning, before the call, practicing her moving-target drills. I think one misconception people have is that officers use their TASERs all the time — but sometimes months, even a year, can go by without using them. That’s why frequent training is so important.
She said, “I had just done this drill that morning, and I felt so much more prepared when this exact situation happened.” That’s a great testament to how this really works — officers are truly building the skills they need to be successful.
Thi Luu
And that’s saving lives — and that’s exactly what Axon is trying to do with our technology.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, that’s amazing. We’ve been in VR since 2016 — really 2017 — so about nine years. And it’s use cases like this that got us excited in the first place. Like you said, it’s not an exaggeration to say you’re saving lives. Seeing technology create that kind of powerful change in people — it’s just really cool.
Thi Luu
Yeah, and we don’t get those kinds of anecdotes all the time, right? Because if our technology is working, hopefully you don’t hear about bad situations. But it’s incredibly powerful and motivating for our team when we do hear stories like that.
I remember sometime last year, one of our sales experts — who has a great relationship with a customer — got a text from an agency that said something like, “Had another suicide-by-cop incident earlier this morning, but I was well trained to handle it. The VR really made a difference.”
I didn’t realize before joining Axon how common those situations are — people attempting “suicide by cop,” where they charge at an officer with a weapon, hoping to provoke being shot. It’s tragic. But hearing that our training helped an officer deescalate that situation safely — that really shows how VR can make a difference.
Hopefully we are making a difference with this training. We do feel like VR has a strong impact — really preparing officers better and leading to safer communities.
Will Stackable
It's really incredible. And I kind of want to zoom out from individual officers just having this amazing training. What an impact to now. Okay, you're at scale. Brad mentioned at the beginning of the call that this is probably one of the largest deployments of XR in the world right now. What are some of the lessons you've learned as you've gone to scale? I think a lot of organizations and companies, schools, universities—they start with a pilot. Maybe it feels easy because you can do stuff with 50 headsets or even 100 headsets. But once you get into the thousands, things change. What have you learned deploying at scale with many headsets across many departments and locations?
Thi Luu
Yeah, I would say—and one thing to note is, you know, there's also a wide variety among different police agencies across the U.S. There are 17,000 police agencies, and so you have agencies that have 10 officers and agencies that have thousands of officers. So there’s scaling across many agencies as well as scaling across many officers within that agency, right?
But I think in terms of how we scale, it first starts with some level of executive buy-in, right? You have to have some champion at that agency. Sometimes it's a trainer, sometimes it's a deputy chief, or sometimes it's the chief themselves. They really believe that VR can help make an impact. And also, you know, giving them some sort of ROI to make them feel confident in supporting the deployment of VR.
Again, you mentioned earlier, Brad—yes, it's expensive to train with live cartridges. So doing high repetition, there’s an immediate ROI they get there, as well as giving them some of the data showing that officers feel more confident and there are higher retention rates. So it really begins with getting some sort of champion, I think, at the agency.
That person usually will work with their training teams to help deploy. To your point, oftentimes it starts with a few pilots, and then as they get the hang of it and find it successful, they roll it out across their agency. And for large agencies, that can take six months or a year, right? Because they have so many officers to train.
I think it’s also about helping to alleviate some of the pain points around VR. It’s still not simple to set up and use. So when agencies buy Axon VR, we send out a professional services manager to help them get acquainted with the equipment.
Will Stackable
Interesting.
Thi Luu
We help them familiarize themselves with the content and think about how to incorporate VR into their training programs. Having that network of professional services has been really helpful.
Axon also runs a lot of in-person training courses for many of our products. We have a “train the trainer” model. There’s the end officer themselves, there’s usually a trainer, and some agencies have what they call a master instructor—or even a senior master instructor. So we also run training certifications for those higher-level trainers. And as part of those certifications, we educate them on VR so they can bring that knowledge back to their agency.
So we have a multi-pronged approach to help agencies really deploy and be successful with VR.
Brad Scoggin
That's pretty cool. And again, I think sometimes people forget just the people part. You know, there are technical solutions, but because it is such a new technology, you’ve got to put some boots on the ground, I think. And it seems like you've done that—you've done that well. And then the result is that it just kind of goes. There’s some initial upfront investment.
Maybe tell us a little bit—and our listeners are anywhere from pilot to scale, or even just considering—people are very interested in some of the nuts and bolts of how you get that many devices set up and in the wild. And then, what has your process been for content? You’ve got a lot of use cases you talked about, so if there’s anything you could share there, I think that would be very helpful for folks.
Thi Luu
Yeah, again, I think we were lucky because we're part of a larger company, right? Axon has a lot of resources in terms of customer support and professional services. Really, when an agency buys VR, a professional services manager reaches out to them to help them even just unbox the equipment and get the headsets connected to their Wi-Fi network.
They give them some pre-work—like, “Hey, before I come on site, try to do these steps.” And if they have problems, they can call into our customer support. We have a frontline customer support team, but also more technical support staff who can help if there are issues. Even simple things like making sure their IT department whitelists some of our IP addresses so they can access our applications. There’s a lot of that setup work that happens with our professional services team.
Then, when they go on site, they help them learn how to navigate through our different types of content, demo the content, show them how to use it, and explain the different learning objectives of the various modules. From there, we leave behind some resources for the agency.
In addition to that professional services manager who helps with the first-time deployment, medium and larger agencies also have a dedicated customer success manager. If they continue to run into problems, they can reach out to that manager or to support.
We’re constantly releasing new things—putting out release notes to our customers, doing webinars to educate them on the latest content. We just did a webinar yesterday. We try to do those once a quarter, because we’re constantly innovating and launching new features and new content. There’s also ongoing education to make them aware of all the new features available to them.
Thi Luu
But the other thing I’ve learned is that this isn’t like a consumer product—you don’t just build it and people start using it right away. These agencies have training curriculums, and the larger the agency, the further in advance they set those. It’s a little like a teacher—a new textbook comes out, but the teacher doesn’t adopt it right away. They need to learn what’s new in that textbook, how it teaches differently than the old version, and when to build it into their learning plan.
Thi Luu
That same thing happens with our officers, especially at larger agencies. Those curriculums get set far in advance, so we have to spend effort educating them on the new content and helping them figure out how to incorporate it. Again, to your point, there’s a lot of boots-on-the-ground effort to help them really scale their deployments. But we’re also investing in things that make it easier for them to manage their devices—figuring out which content is on which device. We’re investing in more capabilities to help larger agencies manage all their devices.
Brad Scoggin
You said you think selling VR is more exciting than selling textbooks, but it’s pretty easy to measure success with a textbook, right? You answer the questions at the end of the chapter. How do you measure success with VR?
Thi Luu
Yeah, I think there are things we can do—like seeing how much content is being used by an agency and sharing that back with them to show adoption patterns. But right now, it’s a little more anecdotal, based on the experiences we hear from officers. We have a lot of voice-of-customer feedback from talking to agencies. We’re constantly getting agencies to alpha and beta test.
We also send out a CSAT every month to all of our customers, so we pay attention to those scores. Even something as simple as putting a feedback QR code on the back of our headsets lets people fill out a quick survey about their experience.
Those are all ways we collect data on how customers are experiencing the product. But a lot of it is still just talking to our trainers. We’re really fortunate to have strong relationships with our customers, and we engage with trainers at a lot of events, including our annual Axon Week conference. We hear a lot of direct feedback from them—what they think of the product, how we can improve, and where they’ve seen success.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, that’s great. Final question for you as we move to a close: you’ve gone from zero to true scale with some powerful results. What’s one piece of advice you’d give someone who’s at the very beginning of the journey?
Thi Luu
I’d say it goes back to your point—it’s just a technology and a medium. It’s not one of those “build it and they will come” situations. You really have to invest in the processes and mechanisms that drive change management. That’s the part people often forget about, or don’t see how important it is for driving adoption. It’s resource-intensive, but it’s critical to getting that level of buy-in.
Will Stackable
I know Brad said that was the last one, but I want to sneak in a lightning-round question, if that’s okay. As a pioneer in this space, where do you see the future of immersive training going?
Thi Luu
I’m really excited about the future. I think AI has a ton of potential to transform how we do training. We’re experimenting with it now. We actually have a product launching soon called Verbal Skills Training. One of the pain points we heard from our agencies is that newer officers—who grew up texting—don’t always have the best verbal communication skills.
Will Stackable
Interesting.
Thi Luu (
And it’s so important for officers to be able to build rapport with their communities. So we’re launching a new training that uses AI to enable real-time interactions between the trainee and the subject. There are different types of calls. The technology is pretty exciting.
Will Stackable
Wow.
Thi Luu
For example, there might be a call about someone loitering in a parking garage, and your goal is to get that person to leave. We’ve used AI to build out a real-world conversation with that character, and we can program the AI with different personalities. For new recruits, you might start with someone cooperative, but you can also have a character who’s more aggressive—maybe swearing at the officer or refusing to comply.
When we’ve put customers through that, they’ve been really excited about the potential. The amount of complexity and variability officers deal with is hard to simulate, but AI gives them that level of variation and open-world experience that makes training even more effective. That’s something I’m really excited about.
Brad Scoggin
Yeah, that is exciting. I think it’s going to take immersive training to the next level. T, this has been great. We really appreciate you taking the time, and we look forward to chatting again soon.
Thi Luu
Great, thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation.
Will Stackable
Thanks, Thi.
