Commercial UAV Expo 2025 – Our Team’s Takeaways

This year's Commercial UAV Expo was another exciting few days of conversations and learning sessions. The annual pilgrimage to a Las Vegas convention hall has been a much-anticipated event for A2Z Drone Delivery since we launched our first-generation commercial drone winch from the show in 2019.

We sure have come a long way from that first small booth in the startup zone. Over the years, the venue has been a great platform for us to roll out our latest technological advances from our growing fleet of commercial delivery drones, to, most recently, our ecosystem of A2Z AirDocks. This year, we were able to bring a full-sized, fully-functional AirDock Quad to our booth. The scale of our elevated automated drone charging station was a real showstopper. More importantly, it allowed attendees to truly understand how our vision for an interconnected network of drone docks can support multiple drone missions simultaneously.

The Commercial UAV Expo has changed a great deal in the last six years. Not only its physical layout and volume – the show did go on even through the pandemic years – but it has also charted the growth of the commercial drone industry as a whole.

This year, our team noticed some overarching trends and major steps for commercial UAV services. Here are some of the key takeaways from our week in Vegas.

Maturing Market Seeks Value-Driven Use Cases

The drone industry is decidedly maturing. With operators leveraging autonomous drone capabilities combined with artificial intelligence, commercial drones are being brought to bear on truly value-driven use cases. Many attendees at this year’s Expo have paid close attention to the use cases coming online around the world and are eager to adapt those applications to their business models. 

More than ever, service providers and enterprise customers have a solid understanding of what they want to accomplish with their drone-borne services, and are using the Expo as a platform from which to shop for the tools that will make those use cases come to life. Along with those fully-formed use cases, many of the conversations we had with attendees demonstrated that today’s operators are fluent in the regulatory and safety requirements for commercial drone missions. This is a knowledge base that certainly takes time to develop, and the audience at this year’s show was highly attuned to what it takes to properly stand-up new use cases.

In a related takeaway, we also found many established companies, from drone service providers to large enterprise industries that have been deploying drones for years, looking to expand their airborne UAV capabilities. In many cases, operators are ready to move beyond a single-operator-single-drone paradigm to launch autonomous fleet capabilities. Most of those proposed use cases and mission parameters are already possible under existing Part 107 regulations, and with a growing library of precedents for their award, waivers are far more navigable than in the past. The day of a single operator arriving at a job site with a single UAV in their truck is giving birth to a need for very-purposeful UAVs carrying highly specialized payloads.

Part 108 Creating a Sense of Urgency

Attendees were also excited for the highly anticipated Part 108 regulations that are expected to open the door to new drone delivery services in the US. But, drone delivery is not limited to retail, food, or parcel payloads. Many existing service providers and exciting new use cases are targeting strategic medical deliveries, delivery across mining or energy facilities, marine ports, etc., and even some out-of-the-box applications like wildlife rescue operations.

While there are still questions about what Part 108 will really require, the market as a whole has been buoyed by the prospect of modernizing US regulatory paths for commercial drone delivery. With trial programs surging in Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX and the Charlotte, NC area, operators throughout the US are taking notice and exploring the feasibility of similar trials in their regions.

International Markets Remain Hot as US Opportunity Heats Up

This year’s Expo saw a lot of operators hopping flights into Vegas from all over the world. Internationally, drone delivery operations are taking root quickly – likely because of the more mature regulatory settings there. Regions like Europe (controlled under EASA regulations), Nordic countries, South Asia, the Middle East, Central America and the Caribbean are primed for the adoption of more extensive commercial drone delivery services.

Domestically, there is still some uncertainty around what Part 108 will say about the regulatory challenges for commercial drone delivery and delivering packages for profit. As the new Part 108 rules gain some further clarity, we’d expect a lot of the interested attendees from the United States to be ready to jump into action pretty quickly, though. Beyond delivery, other use cases are seeing high interest here in the US, especially drones-as-first-responders (DFR), AI-supported surveillance and patrol missions, and other coastal operations where drones can operate over waterways or support lifesaving missions for police, fire, rescue and lifeguards. 

While most of the proposed operations we fielded at last week’s Expo were purely value-driven, some were truly purpose-driven. Can our commercial delivery drones help researchers better track whales, maybe even save some whale lives? Stay tuned.

Drone-in-a-Box Solutions are Driving Autonomy

Our team was particularly interested to see multiple drone-in-a-box (DIB) solutions at the Expo. The ability to conduct autonomous, repeatable missions is being driven by DIB and drone dock proliferation. The days of a single pilot arriving on scene with a single standalone drone aren’t truly sustainable or scalable. DIB ecosystems enable missions to scale, with pilots transitioning from single UAV operations to one-to-many operations where a single pilot manages an entire fleet of drones operating within a connected network of drone docks from a remote operations center.

Our CEO, Aaron Zhang, participated in a panel discussion about how these systems are establishing real efficiency and delivering value at scale for regionalized, shared drone services. As part of the discussion, Aaron provided an in-depth overview of how our A2Z AirDocks are deployed outside our BVLOS test facility to simultaneously patrol local water resources, assist as DFR drones, and conduct last-mile drone delivery for local restaurants.

While there were several versions of a weatherproof drone dock in the exhibit hall and shared in the conference presentations, our AirDocks were the only solution we saw that supported these multi-mission deployments. We designed the A2Z AirDocks specifically for this multi-mission demand. It's this unique AirDock capability that enables drone services to easily and affordably scale – both the size of the services area, and the multiple services that can be layered upon a drone dock network. 

For example, the initial multi-mission BVLOS drone operations that are ongoing near our test facility started with two Longtail Patrol drones hopping between eight AirDocks that could service 120 square miles. That deployment has now expanded to 20 AirDocks, and an ever-growing fleet of Longtail UAVs that have expanded joint operations to 300 square miles.

Final Thoughts for Commercial UAV Expo 2025

The annual Commercial UAV Expo is always a bit of a gauge for how the commercial drone industry is growing, maturing, and accelerating, and 2025 was no different. We found this year’s snapshot of the industry to be full of operators, manufacturers, supply vendors, and pilots that have their eyes firmly beyond the horizon and ready to take on increasingly complex, value-driven missions.

If you are looking to tackle new and exciting challenges with your commercial drone program, reach out to our team to learn how we can be the technology partner that makes your next missions a reality.