A recent forecast from Gartner has indicated that businesses will start deploying IoT-powered enterprise drones more frequently going forward in 2020. These drones can be used in industries like construction, utility, and retail.
Gartner predicts that global shipments of IoT enterprise drones will total 526,000 units, an increase of 50% from 2019. By 2023, the global research firm predicts that global shipments will reach 1.3m units. It will be the construction industry that will be making the most use of these drones between 2019 and 2023 – with shipments increasing from 141,100 in 2019 to 209,800 in 2020 to 509.5 in 2023.
Kay Sharpington, a principal analyst at Gartner, said: “The construction sector is an early adopter of drones, which causes construction monitoring to be the largest use case by shipments worldwide across the forecast. Drones are taking over tasks such as site surveying and earthworks management as they are faster and safer to carry out with a drone than on foot.”
The report also revealed that in order to save costs while surveying sites, number of global construction employees per drone will fall from 2,400 to 640 between 2018 and 2020. There are also plans to help these employees, Gartner added. Commercial utilization of drones in Southeast Asia is forecasted to increase with regulations catching up rapidly.
Because of the technical complexity of other applications, Gartner believes that in the short term, most enterprise-grade IoT-powered drone use cases will be based around monitoring and surveillance. For the year 2020, the second and third use cases by drone shipments will be fire services monitoring and insurance investigation, which will draw 48,500 and 46,400 shipments respectively.
Retail fulfillment and police evidence gathering are the final two use cases among the top five of the 25+ use cases that are assessed by Gartner.
When it comes to drones, businesses have remarkable opportunities right in front of them – how wisely they make use of these drones will only determine how they benefit from it.
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