What Are the Top Uses for Drones in 2024? New Report Reveals Trends in Commercial Drone Applications

How are drones being used today?

Drone Industry Insights (DroneII) just put out a report on commercial drone uses, with findings for the top industries and applications for drones across the world.

Here are the major findings:

• The top industries for drone applications are Energy, Construction, and Agriculture, in that order.
• The top drone applications are Drone Mapping & Surveying, Drone Inspections, and Drone Photography & Filming, in that order.

Credit: Drone Industry Insights

Some other interesting takeaways from DroneII’s reporting:

• Energy—the top industry using drones in the world—also has the greatest variety of use cases, leveraging all seven of the uses that DroneII reported on.
• Drone Mapping & Surveying—the top drone application in the world—is used in every one of the 17 industries considered except Insurance.
• Drone Inspections—the 2nd drone application in the world—is also used by every industry considered, with the exception of Arts & Entertainment.

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What Are the Main Benefits Drones Provide?

We hear about drone benefits all the time—they make inspections cheaper, faster, safer, and often better, for instance.

These benefits are touted so often that they can start to seem a little rote. And that means we may run the risk of forgetting how remarkable it is that one tool can make a variety of work not just faster, safer, and cheaper—but also actually of better quality, all at the same time.

DroneII’s reporting calls these benefits out, highlighting that across all 17 industries and seven use cases it looked at, drones provide four primary benefits:

• Reducing the time needed to do a given job
• Reducing the costs associated with a given job
• Improving the quality of the output for a given job
• Improving worker safety for a given job

All four of these benefits work together, creating a powerful combination of value for any industry using drones, regardless of its specific needs.

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Number of Industries Growing, Number of Uses Fairly Set

In total, 17 industries and seven applications were considered for DroneII’s 2024 Industries & Methods report.

That large number of industries tells its own story—17 is a high number, but there probably could have been a lot more industries included. And that’s because almost every industry in the world uses drones these days.

Just think about that. Every major industry in the world is using drones. That’s also a remarkable thing to be able to say.

On the other hand, the primary uses for drones are now fairly fixed.

In the coming years, we don’t expect to see the number of uses jump by any significant amount up from the seven DroneII reported on. Rather, we expect to see improved sensors and software continue to make those existing seven uses better and better.

One Main Use Case Per Industry

It’s no secret that the sheer number of use cases for drones is growing all the time. As you read this, a new one or three will probably be thought up.

Despite all this innovation, the core use cases for drones are now well established and not likely to change much. When talking about crawl, walk, run phases of development, the drone industry is thoroughly in the walking phase.

What’s more, the industries that use drones also now have a clear understanding of the specific value they can provide, down to the specific use cases that most benefit their work.

As Drone Industry Insights points out in a blog post accompanying the 2024 Industries & Methods report, most industries that use drones “are focused on one application method.”

• The Arts & Entertainment industry primarily uses drone photography
• The Insurance industry primarily uses drones for roof inspections, to evaluate insurance claims
• The Mining & Quarrying industry primarily uses drones for Mapping & Surveying

Of course, this one industry/one use case model doesn’t hold true for all industries.

. . . Practically all industries use drones for various activities beyond one primary usage, and some are not exclusively focused on just one application method.

– DroneII

It shows just how far the usefulness of drones has come that there are now recognized ways to use drones across dozens of types of work.

That kind of knowledge only comes from experience, and it’s a great thing that the drone industry is now in a place where people have accumulated enough lived knowledge they can start to pass it along to newer generations of drone pilots.