Can drones deliver both aspects of the key 21st century trends
I was recently flying back to the UK (as a passenger this time, not operating the aircraft in my other jobs!) and read a magazine article that described the 2 most powerful trends of the 21st century. I’ve been directly involved with drones for over 4 years, aviation over 13 years and wondered how applicable these two trends are to drones.
Even now we have a BBC news article about drones putting workers out of jobs. The question I ask myself if are we heading towards a workless future where jobs are disappearing in every walk of industry ultimately including my own profession — how do we adapt to that challenge. According to JP Gownder, a principal analyst at research firm Forrester “automation technologies, including artificial intelligence, will replace 17% of US jobs by 2027”.
The inexorable rise of automation is one of the two major trends sweeping through consumerism and business right now. The second and equally important one is that of experientialism (personalisation).
And they are really two sides of a single coin. The question I’ve tried to answer here is what does that mean to the potential users of drones and how does Consortiq address both sides of the coin.
On the one hand, there is rising expectation that many aspects of life be fast, easy and frictionless. The automation of everyday services delivers just that, by cutting out the often slow, inefficient human component of the service.
CQNet, our Consortiq safety management system was designed with this exact goal in mind; by aiding operations in UAS Management, Maintenance, Airspace Intelligence and Mission Planning to save time, money and productivity in its first iteration.
On the other hand, we want the functional aspects of our lives to be fast so that we can give more time to the non-functional, discretionary parts: the things we want to do. That’s the other side of the coin here. In a world of material abundance, we place ever more value on rare, surprising, enriching experiences.
In any occupation you end up working in, the truism we all hear people saying is that “it’s a small industry” with the same players over a period of time. The involvement of other people is fundamental to many of the experiences we value most. Indeed, the more faceless the world around us becomes, the more we value the bespoke, intimate and human. So how do we square that circle as a software company?
We’ve been working on that experiential differentiator in Consortiq. Consider an enterprise user who is looking to use drones within a sports science environment. The challenge faced is how to embed such an operative within the sports team training and scouting division. By employing an in-house or specialised pilot(s), coaches and scouts gain trust that the footage needed is exactly what they want and how they need it. They will then understand data capture settings, frame rates, codecs to deliver what each organisation needs. That comes through specialist drone training interweaved with CQNet.
Secondly, we make sure our customer experience using our software is key. From a risk perspective we tailor SPI (Safety Point Indicators) to your needs. With data security we pre-empt IT details via a SLA (Service Level Agreement) and a dedicated IT liaison for each company. Then as an operator we provide an in-person demo and provide channels of professional information. As an accountable manager you can have the best software, but if you don’t know how to use it effectively, you won’t be as successful a program manager as you could be: Our support team makes sure that you are using every feature that you need to use to succeed.
By seeing these two powerful, related trends and how we adapt to it, it becomes clear that the workless future is not as certain as many are making out. Yes, automation may remove the flying aspect of the remote pilot. But in an automated world there will also be ever greater demand for the bespoke, artisan and human side within drones and our challenge is to still show there are people behind that software and who we are.
In summary, in a world where pretty much everything necessary becomes automated, what we’ll have left is each other. Part of this is what has been coined by Trendwatching as “Glass-Box Brands” and Consortiq aspire to set that trend within its staff by bringing automation and experientialism to life not only to clients but showcasing our staff who live and breathe our ethos of EDPSC (Entrepreneurial, Driven, Passionate, Smart, Curious) to enable business transformations for operators, manufacturers and regulators.
