Drones Preserve Utilities' Institutional Knowledge
Partnerships lead at Skydio on where value accrues in the drone stack
This is why drones become more than a cheaper camera in utilities, they are a way to turn veteran workers’ judgment into repeatable digital workflows. A lineman does not just spot a bad insulator, he knows which defects matter, how urgent they are, and what to check next. Utilities want drones, thermal imagery, and asset software so that know how gets captured in photos, maps, annotations, and maintenance systems instead of disappearing when crews retire.
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In practice, the shift is from ladders, trucks, and helicopters to drones that gather close up color and infrared images of towers, substations, and lines, then push that data into systems like SAP, IBM Maximo, or Oracle where the inspection history becomes searchable and reusable by newer crews.
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The bottleneck is not only flying the drone, it is knowing what the images mean. One large utility moved from roughly 30 full time image reviewers to almost none after building AI review on top of drone data, with humans mainly checking the flagged issues. That is institutional knowledge getting formalized into software.
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This is also where value shifts in the drone stack. Hardware gets the drone in the air, but the sticky layer is the vertical software that fits utility workflows, such as inspection history, asset records, defect triage, and integrations into the utility’s existing operating systems. Skydio sells into that broader hardware plus software model today.
The next step is utilities running more of this work as a digital system, with safer autonomous flights, larger image libraries, and AI models trained on years of defect data. That will favor drone vendors and software providers that can turn every inspection into a permanent record, not just a one time flight.