How Drones Are Accelerating Digital Transformation in the Insurance Industry | Claims Journal

Somewhere in central Michigan, a pickup truck drives into a sleepy suburban neighborhood by Michael Park, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at EagleView.

Photo: Flo Dnd from Pexels

An autonomous drone takes flight off the truck’s flatbed and, nearly silently, heads a half-mile east, slowing above a mid-20th century craftsman home that has clearly suffered damage to its roof after a particularly brutal hailstorm.

The drone then makes a careful and artful loop of a house’s shingled rooftop, snapping hundreds of photos as it circles the perimeter of the home, barely three feet from the roof itself. Its job done, the drone returns to the truck and snaps back into its docking station. The photos are securely transferred to the cloud.

Some 1,000 miles away, a claims adjuster in Shreveport, Louisiana, with 30 years of experience under her belt, views the photos, rendered onto her iPhone in the form of a three-dimensional model of the home. She determines the roof must be replaced and escalates the claim into the payout stage. The claim is processed in record time, without a site visit and at a fraction of the cost.

This was the vision of the future many had hoped for when drone technology was first introduced to the insurance space about six years ago...

A little further out on the horizon, momentum is building for the FAA to loosen its restriction that all drone pilots must be able to visibly see their craft’s flight pattern (the “Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS)” requirement). That will open the door to a world of fully autonomous drones that can fly further and for longer periods, covering large ranges of geography and capturing aerial imagery at an even more economical rate. This could happen as soon as three years from now, according to a study by Deloitte.
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Source: Claims Journal