Value-added services to get the drone market off the ground

The business of professional services provided by drones sees only the 'Aerial operations' segment take off, those activities, for example, involving the inspection of power lines, land control and monitoring, which accounted for 95% of the business in 2025. The remaining share relates to the 'Innovative Air Mobility and Deliveries' segment, i.e. freight and passenger transport, which saw slight growth in 2025. A market in which the value of services last year reached 168 million, up 5% on the previous year, and which has seen the number of companies grow after five years: the drone ecosystem now numbers 675 companies, 661 of which are focused on Aerial operations. There is one on advanced and higher value-added services such as precision agriculture, cleaning and maintenance.

This is revealed by the Observatory on Drones and Advanced Aerial Mobility of the Politecnico di Milano presented today, which highlights a growing but slowing trend. Among other things, last year saw a thinning of the distinction between civil and security applications. In fact, for almost a third of the companies in the sector, the current geopolitical scenario is deeply influencing public opinion and can be an obstacle to development. However, according to the Observatory, perceptions towards these means of transport are changing among Italians: 93% of people consider them useful for transporting medical equipment, 84% say they are useful for transporting goods and 73% for transporting people.

"2025 was a year of technological consolidation and strategic and operational maturation for the ecosystem of drones and advanced aerial mobility, but also the moment in which the boundary between civil and defence applications became thinner," explains Marco Lovera, scientific head of the Drones and Advanced Aerial Mobility Observatory. We have witnessed significant growth in high-value public applications, from healthcare logistics to environmental monitoring, from precision agriculture to search and rescue, while at an international level the first passenger air taxi services have taken off. As the sector has been strengthened by investment and innovation, attention to the regulatory framework and risk management, including privacy and misuse, has increased in parallel'.

At the moment, the demand coming from the PA is substantially marginal and worth only 10% of the market, but over the last few years it has been following a gradually growing trend. Today there are more than 148 thousand drones registered on the d-flight platform and more than 185 thousand active operators, up from 126 thousand drones and 145 thousand operators in 2024. In 2025, there were 44 authorisations for flights 'Beyond the pilot's direct field of view', paving the way for more value-added applications. At the same time, the ecosystem of infrastructures and experimentation is expanding: 3 regulatory sandboxes are active in Rome, Milan and Padua (test areas with simplified rules and procedures), the Grottaglie test bed - an international reference centre for the validation of advanced technologies and services - is operational, and the first European U-space has been established in San Salvo, opening up new development opportunities. There are 10 vertiport projects launched or announced in various cities, supporting more sustainable urban and extra-urban mobility models.

"In Italia, 2025 was a double-speed affair: while life-saving drones completed critical missions and agriculture opened up to new delivery services, Amazon scaled back its drone delivery plans in Italy and the Jubilee did not represent the long-awaited test-bed for air taxis," reports Paola Olivares, director of the Drones and Advanced Aerial Mobility Observatory. "With the technology now mature, the real challenge is to transform the many experiments into ongoing commercial services. It is essential to accelerate infrastructure, regulatory frameworks and public-private partnerships to build a solid, sustainable and globally competitive ecosystem. The growth of the sector cannot, moreover, disregard effective communication, emphasising use cases with a high social impact, which are essential to consolidate trust and overcome societal resistance to the spread of drones'.