bpirruccello

They come from man hour savings from generating a topography of the mine and stockpiles. Our mining customers have found our product gives results within 1.1% of the accuracy of laser scanning the mine and is more accurate than the results from traditional methodology performed by an average ~3 person survey crew. It requires only a single person to capture the mine, and customers get the data back in a single day rather than 3 to 4 days later. Thus, they can capture the mine topography far more inexpensively and far for frequently than they could previously.

I always hear people raise this point but there are better solutions than a flying robot inside of a warehouse.

I'm not sure what conference you were at/what you saw presented, but there is drone software that creates a lot of value for construction, engineering, and mining companies. BVLOS may create a lot of value some day, but there are a lot more technical hurdles that will need to be cleared before it becomes safe and mainstream, just like Level 4/5 self driving cars. (unless you're talking about doing FPV inspections.)

Disclosure, I originally was the product manager for 3DR's flagship software product, Site Scan, which drove our transition from a hardware business to a software business, and I am currently VP of Marketing and Business Development here. Each mine that deploys our software saves, on average, 6 figures per year (after the product cost). This is on man-hour costs alone - the value is greater if you look at the increased safety of taking individuals out of active mines and increasing topography capture that enables analysts to identify issues before they turn into safety hazards on site.

That's just for one industry we serve - cost savings/time savings/improvements in project pursuit are all high for construction and engineering as well.

I think it's likely you saw some presentations from companies that had not done enough customer discovery or they were perhaps just very early in the process of identifying real problems and building the right solutions, but it's not representative of the industry.