How drones are becoming critical infrastructure for utilities
What does the pathway look like from shiny new toy to core operational tool? That’s the trajectory drones have seemingly taken in many utility operations, highlighting that the hype was real an the future is now.
On this episode of Power Perspectives, host Matt Chester goes behind the scenes with three members of Skydio's utility team to show why drones have graduated from novelty to mission-critical infrastructure. In this conversation, Christina Park (Senior Director, Energy Strategy), Suchet Bargoti (Director of Inspection and Mapping), and Cooper Linn (Senior Product Manager) walk through real-world utility deployments, the field-driven product choices that mattered, and how autonomy is changing inspection workflows.
Skydio’s case studies highlight how drone deployments have moved from proving concepts to operational scale: the shift to “drones as infrastructure,” the importance of engineers riding along on field missions, and the evolution from broad 3D semantic scans to efficient, asset-based inspection workflows that actually save crews time and prevent outages.