The global commercial drone market size was estimated at USD 19.89 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.9% from 2023 to 2030. The market growth is attributed to the increasing enterprise application of drones across various industry verticals. Several drone manufacturers are continually testing, inventing, and upgrading solutions for diverse markets. Besides, the integration of modern technologies in commercial drones to deliver enhanced solutions is opening new growth opportunities for the commercial drone industry. The business use cases of commercial drones have expanded significantly over the past few years.

Drones are increasingly adopted in the construction and real estate sectors due to their ability to survey a property, offer constant and exact project alerts, increase safety, and prevent harmful accidents on construction sites. Moreover, their conventional applications, such as monitoring, surveillance, and security, have boosted the product demand for search and rescue operations, identifying unstable roofs in dangerous and inaccessible positions, and inspecting elevated infrastructure that might damage equipment such as electrical cables.

The commercial drone market growth is further driven by technological advances in electronics, such as modern computing, microcontrollers, processors, mobile hardware, and cameras. For instance, in September 2022, AeroVironment Inc. launched Vapor 55MX, a next-generation VAPOR Helicopter that caters to customers from the defense, commercial, and industrial sectors.

Technological advancements allow companies to design and construct measurement and annotation tools for estimating area, volume, and distance. As a result, organizations are constantly adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions to retrieve accurate findings from large volumes of data. Integration of these modern technologies provides the industry with ample opportunities as they facilitate real-time, data-driven decision-making through high-speed data capture, processing, and transfer. AI-powered drones also allow users to interact and observe footage captured by other drones in real-time and track their flight paths.