“2020 is going to be an exciting year for the drone industry, as Autonomous things and Democratization of data will continue to be part of the Strategic Technology Trends (according to Gartner) for the upcoming year, I believe it will impact on the drone industry as follows:
Scale: 2020 will be all about enterprise scale. We will see customers executing more missions than ever to digitize their field assets and operations, getting better actionable insights. As expectation evolve, enterprises will need to address increasingly complex scenarios that will be bring more challenges of scale.
Crystallization of value: Now that we are past the hype of “drones can do everything”, industry understand what drone are really good at. Clear use cases have crystallized with the required track record to demonstrate true ROI. Enterprises are continuously evaluating new use cases, adding drones into their workflows and developing long-range plans. 2020 will be the year that drones become common practice in industries such as tower, asset and structure inspection while new use case continue to emerge.
Power of AI: AI is increasingly developed as the means of automation. Whether it is to enable truly autonomous flight and data capture or in analyzing the huge amount of data captured by drones, AI will continue to radically transform the drone industry. Convergence of drone technology with Machine learning helps infrastructure managers identify quality defects, malfunctions, as well as inventory errors like never before. I am truly excited about what AI and analytics will further do to the drone space.
Partnerships and consolidation will continue, with the goal of delivering end-to-end, state-of-the-art solutions. Market players will consolidate globally, to deliver demonstrated business applications that provide customers with ongoing value across various verticals.”