# Building a Security Business by Blending Drones, Robotics, and Autonomous Response - Event: NestGen ’26 - Published: October 2, 2026 - Length: 37:36 - Watch: https://nestgen.org/library/watch/2_7gmWqPiEw/ > The transcript of a recorded NestGen session, for reading or for use with an AI tool. It comes from the video's > captions; automatic captions can mishear names and terms. ## About this session Security providers are being asked to cover more sites, verify more alarms, and respond faster, while labour stays expensive and hard to find. Drones, ground robots, and autonomous response are turning into a new service layer, not just a tool that sits alongside guards. In this NestGen session, FlytBase will share how security companies can build a business around blended drone, robotics, and autonomous response, and what it takes to package, price, and deliver it across a portfolio of client sites. ## Transcript **[0:15]** Hey, hi everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're joining from. I'm Achal. I'm one of the co-founders at FlytBase and I run GTM and business development at FlytBase. Awesome. Let's see. Let's wait for people to join in. Uh at least some of the session they would be coming from other session. We have had really great keynote so far talking about different layers of enterprise program. We also had a session from DJI talking about how the doctrine has been deployed and a sneak peek of what's coming with the DJI with the next set of hardware. We also heard from Sarawak Energy about how they are doing deployments and there are more sessions which are going on. So, great start of the day with Mission and uh today let's get started with the topic that I'm going to speak about. So, one of the most used popular use cases has been security. And **[1:16]** the topic is of course related to why now for security and how to start your program. So, if somebody in the chat if you are already in security, show a raise of hands or just say yes, I'm in security. Uh so, I'll know who is in the audience. If you're already deploying autonomous drones for security or you're looking to deploy it for security or you're looking to build a program. Let's show of hands or just said yes on the chat. Uh and I'll get to know. Awesome. So, most of the time like if you're looking to build this kind of a program internally, everybody would ask how do you build it, right? What's your our drone strategy? Uh right, how how would you go about it? Uh so, the session of course is not only focus on drones like how drones would work, but how you as a person inside a company or particularly a security company **[2:17]** uh who knows already drones matter, but want to build a program that how do I take care of different elements? Uh what are the things that need to care take care of? How do I need to build an internal case? This is the uh session that talks about that in detail. So, I've tried to uh break down that into multiple elements. Uh so, it's easier for you to consume this and uh see how you can uh propose a program internally at your security company to start drones. And uh next 20-25 minutes will go to why is the time? Uh why now? What's possible? Who's already doing it? We'll look at uh some case studies and we end at uh how to start. Right? All set? Let's go ahead. So, the first thing that I've course shared is why now? Because if you have met me 2 years ago uh or I would have done the session 2 years ago, I would have not talked about security audience or consider considering drones for security. And why is that **[3:20]** the case, right? Why security? Why this one of the obvious use case uh with drones, why it was not never kind of on top of mind, right? People must have tried something, but failed. So, let's understand like what has changed in last couple of years. So, what used to happen is the honest story is drones have been around for a decade or more. And they've been used for like we have used drones for multiple use cases. But if you had do security, a pilot for every flight was required. Someone had to be on the site, launch it, fly it, land it, stream the live video feed, and be honest, I've seen those use cases and lot of service providers and companies providing that security service, but that means that you need for 100 drones, you need 100 pilots. That means you pay a pilot labor on every flight. You need to pay for the hourly **[4:21]** rate, and a full-time pilot on site never pays back compared to the other security systems that you already have such as feet on ground, CCTV cameras, and so on. So, routine work, daily patrols, alarm checks, which are core to the security business, were never viable. And drones stayed where the math told it to go. So, if it's very sensitive, somebody would put in a pilot to fly a drone, or you would then think of putting a dedicated drone so it can just be in the air. It is just nothing but a very high up camera looking at the site. So, and most of the deployments that we have saw we have seen with drones was more of DFR use case or emergency response, but never actually a security program. We had never seen a security company adopting drones and deploying it for large site, be it a airspace manufacturing facility, or be it a waste management facility, or be **[5:22]** it a very sensitive building which needs to be protected, or any big site. So, what changed? And I would summarize into two major changes that have come in. First, the dock. But, obvious, right? That's what we're talking about today, the entire next 15 hours. Uh the dock enables us to launch a drone, land, recharge itself without having any pilot on the ground. And on top of that, another unlock is AI. Where even if the fly deploy autonomous drones, and I look at it, I still would need human to sit on the screen and watch the live video feed. And that becomes unscalable if you don't have AI. You need systems which can detect, which can notify, which can act on your behalf. All right, you would of course have to be at the driving seat where you you can visualize everything, uh and run it, but AI is driving it for you. **[6:25]** So, together the operating cost has significantly come down. All right, so there's it has come down order of magnitude. What if you compare it with having a manual drone operation for security, and then a person looking at the video feed or a footage, and then taking out something, it was completely unviable. And we are seeing that 100x improvement where now you can deploy autonomous drones and do the entire security operations. And we would see lot of case studies today that are more than 18 sessions focused on security and public safety today at Nest Cam. So, and security is becomes actually a perfect fit for this use case. I was looking at the data of the number of flights that is happening on the platform. And 90% of the flights actually do security. There are of course other use cases which are happening, but security becomes a backbone for any deployment. **[7:26]** The reason again is we have defined boundaries in security. You can get a approval of bureau's approval for that site. You're mostly doing a perimeter scan, or you're doing a patrol inside, so you're scanning the site. You're repeating those patrols, so your flights are fixed. The routes are predictable. And even if you get an alarm responses, you know you are in the defined boundary. And this is why security has become one of the fastest growing use case for autonomous drones. So, what's now possible? What has opened up? What's the unlock? Right, there are three jobs that were hard or impossible to do without a drone. Uh with autonomous drones to be precise. Number one is scheduled rounds, where you can deploy autonomous drones. You can uh plan the routes, and you can have a drone up in the air 24/7. **[8:26]** For example, if you have two DJI Dock 3s deployed on your site, a drone could be up in the air all the time in doing a patrol. The same route, the fixed schedule, day and night. It can automatically switch cameras from uh RGB to thermal. All those workflows are possible today. And it can go around and give you the entire data of the site at any particular time. Second, responding to alarms have been the most uh costly affair, I would say, because lot of that uh alarms could be false. Or sometimes when it's real, it's a threat to a human life, probably. Somebody with the could be armed. Uh somebody could have certain things which uh would cause damage to property or human there. And it's better to get the eyes in the sky first to see how you need to respond. Now, because you did not have autonomous drones before, uh it was very difficult to **[9:27]** have somebody manually fly the drone there or do a go-to location. But now with the dock drone, you can easily integrate alarm source. Be it a detection from CCTV camera, from uh motion sensor, perimeter system, a fence system, a radar which is based set on your site and it's detecting intruders on the site. You can easily dispatch or it could be a simple notification from a ground personnel who saw something and you can dispatch it wrong. And the third one is evidence. And when I say evidence, how do we make sense of that data? How do we automatically detect certain anomaly or certain behavior? That has completely unlocked with AI. So, while every flight is recorded, you can actually investigate and you could have admissible admissible evidence which could be given to a police department or a court or how the next step needs to be taken. So, you could have the entire evidence with all of that data. Now, all **[10:29]** these three unlocks are very important because without say the third one with AI, all you would have is tons of data and nobody would take a look at that. >> [snorts] >> You need a system which can give you detections for almost anything that you're looking to detect on the site with AI agents as well as once you've stored the data, you need a system which can help you trace back everything that if you're looking for a particular vehicle or a car or a a person, it can actually tell you the entire track history of where did you see that person at what point of time and what kind of site. And today, none of this requires pilot on the site. And let let me walk through each of them quickly so we understand these use cases because these are the backbone of any security deployments. So, if you look at schedule patrols, uh now you have the entire systems which allow you to plan rounds. **[11:32]** Uh you can schedule it on a calendar for say every hour. You can set the entire workflow that uh, if you see something uh, say stop it there, collect the evidence, uh, broadcast something on the loudspeaker. The dog uh, the drone can launch on its own, uh, fly to the same path, altitude, camera angles every single round. And AI scans the feed, flags people, vehicles, anything that changed. And then once it is done, the drone would come back and land. So, after every round you can have a question that, "Hey, did you see any unusual things?" And the system can report to you. And it's not something that you have to wait for hours. All of that could be done live and operator could be alerted. So, say a drone is flying and it flags a certain activity, say couple of people uh, notified or uh, you saw the drone sees them at a particular site, it can give the live notifications and the response could be planned. **[12:33]** So, one thing to remember is the same route with same uh, every angle, every round stay uh, changes uh, the way you do the security. And that kind of helps you emulate a guard on the site, right? Which was never possible even with a foot on ground, you could still have lot of blind spot with a single person going by a vehicle or by foot to go to the entire site and do perimeter patrol. Every site wanted to do it much more frequently, but with just humans it was not possible. Now with this blended model where you have autonomous drones flying and your security guard sitting at your security operation center can completely see the site at that particular patrol as well as AI is there to assist him or her uh, to uh, get any kind of notification and a plan the response and the system works for that person. Second, we spoke about the alarm response and uh this is where uh the economics **[13:39]** completely changes. Because if the alarm fires, the drone could launch, you have a eyes on the scene almost immediately. Every minute counts at that stage. You need to know what happened at that point of time. You need to verify whether it's real, it is something internal, it was some false alarm. And most time data says that shows that 70 to 80% of time these are just false alarms which have come in and you end up spending the time and resources to go there. Today's SOP would be to send a person to every of one of them because alarm's important. That's what you install. That's why you install them. You need to go there and most of the time goes for such kind of alarm responses. Uh and if it's false, then yeah, like you you ended up wasting time. But now with the drone, you you can easily see visualize what happened there. Do you need to send somebody? Uh do you need to act fast on it? It could be a fire incident. It could be a theft incident. It could be some vandalism that is happening there. You can **[14:40]** report. You can call cops uh because you already have the proof. You can share that live link uh with third party uh for people outside your organization. So if they need to see that, it could be a cop nearby uh or uh additional services who who are helping you, you can actually share that uh live incident with everybody. And on top of that, you could of course track the person, keep the scene under watch until the backup arrives. So with autonomous tracking of person, scene description, you have you need don't need to send human, but you need care continuously uh tracking without uh bringing human life in danger. So this kind of fast response, false alarm elimination, continuous observation, all three are hard to do without autonomous drones, and that use case has suddenly opened up. Uh we recently deployed autonomous drones in Uruguay, uh where we had integration with sensor on the sides, and there were so many incidents that happened in that big site. We ended up **[15:43]** responding to 3,000 alarms in just over 3 months. That is a huge cost benefit of deploying this technology because you you could have ended up sending people 3,000 times in 3 months on a large site. That is really, really big cost advantage. Third job of what we spoke about is AI, and AI is there to give you more data, more analysis, and reconstruct everything for you. So, every patrol would add footage and data. Over weeks, you'd build a history of site automatically. Some of the incidents uh data shows that happens over days where if somebody is looking to sabotage or do a theft, it's not something that they would plan out of uh in thin air to come on the site and do this. People could be loitering on the site. They could be planning some activities over days. And with this kind of data that you're collecting through the patrols, AI can make sense of it and flag that anomaly. The where was that **[16:45]** vehicle? Was it at the right property where you could have the full trace uh enter the it could be you get get the data that it enter the gate in the morning, parked in the yard in the midday, and loading in the afternoon, and left in the evening, and then something happened between that time. And without scrubbing the footage, you could also now have forensic search where you can search a query, and it could look at all the data from your uh footage that has been collected and give you the reports and pinpoint the exact instances that you're looking for. This also helps not just for evidence to say cops or any submersible report, but insurance authorities could also take a look because if you are already insured and you need evidence, this could act as proof of what happened on the site. So, where does the ROI show up? There are four places. You are of course **[17:48]** getting very big benefit on the numbers and you can build an internet case with reducing cost per response. We have seen that reduced to order of magnitude. So, drone verification versus sending a guard, huge upside. So, this should be in your business case. Reducing the response time, so from minutes from alarms to eyes on the scene. Guard hours free, so what kind of the people that you already have in the team, you are freeing up their time so they can actually spend time on more meaningful things. And time no longer spent checking false alarm, the capacity goes back into the higher value work or more sites with the same team. That is a big advantage. And then the coverage on the site, right? So, coverage per site increases the areas couple of drone docks could cover versus one patrolling guard or couple of patrolling people on the site is huge. And you can get the entire analysis, heat signatures of is are there any areas where a drone is missing seeing it or there are **[18:52]** have any areas where you don't have cameras, you don't have anything. So, these are four points which needs to be there in your business case and you need to build your entire program around these four points. So, one advice could be that you can measure your baseline of what you're spending today with the guards and you can compare that with what is your cost per response, your response time, how many hours you can get freed, and what are the if you're leaving certain areas of the site, how could you actually get more coverage? And all this case makes it undeniable that the future where once you get to the stage of deploying this or when getting this project getting started, these things help you measure your success over time. So, thinking about this over the last few months, when we looked at the current systems that existed today, most of the systems today just help you fly **[19:55]** the drone. So, if you go for autonomous drone, there could be a software that comes native with it. Most of the time it it's just designed to do drone operations, never designed for security operations, never designed to actually help you achieve these metrics, never designed with the AI which is actually designed for security and the workflows with different dashboards and screens where security supervisor, a security guard, person put on the ground, or a cop could actually see the live video feed. So, there would be multiple people who would have different separation of concerns, all right, what they're looking at that particular site and how they are actually collaborating on a particular incident. So, thinking about that, we are launching today's a new product which is designed for security and rapid response and we are calling it Sekura. So, Sekura is by FlytBase is a dedicated offering which is not just a drone **[20:57]** autonomy software, it's an entire platform to run your security and emergency response operations. We would talk about in more detail in the further sessions about secure and you learn about different elements features of this product. But the session today is focused on how to build your program and secure would be a essential element of integrating this autonomous drone into your current security infrastructure or services. So let me play a quick video to help you understand what secure is. >> Security doesn't fail all at once. It fails in brief critical moments. A wall is marked before anyone has time to react. A lock is forced in the quiet moments before anyone even notices. A perimeter is crossed without a single alarm stopping it. It's not about being reactive. **[21:59]** It's about being proactive. BMS flags an unauthorized presence. A drone is dispatched instantly. Live feed provides immediate confirmation, verified, recorded, and actionable. A perimeter sensor triggers an alarm. FlytBase dispatches a drone. The breach is visible in seconds before anyone on the ground has moved. When an unauthorized drone enters the airspace, the Senhive detection system sends an immediate alert to FlytBase pinpointing the intruder's exact coordinates, altitude, and location on the map. With one command, a friendly drone dispatches from the dock and proceeds directly to the intruder's position. No manual tracking, no guesswork. The threat is identified, the response is immediate. On patrol, the drone reacts instantly. The moment something's detected, it's overhead, visible, recording, and alerting. When the last guard clocks out, the drone clocks in. Autonomous patrols run through **[23:00]** the night covering every corner and access point without anyone on site. >> So, that's Secura and the more details available where how the platform has been designed in a modular way. We would not go in the details today, but it has been designed to work with not just drones, but the extended systems of security with the CCTV cameras, sensors, we saw counter drone getting integrated for airspace awareness and rapid response to even robotics in the future. And provides you the entire stack which sits with your security systems providing you the core platform to manage operations, AI, dedicated dashboards for different operations or separation of concerns as we spoke about and also integrating with your current systems like video management systems like Milestone, Genetec, Hikvision, or any other system that **[24:00]** you're using. So, this is system let's let's hear from the people who are already deploying this kind of programs at scale and we have a number of sessions lined up today. So, I would give some sneak peek of some people who I'm share their insights, but they would be speaking at length today and talking about how they are building this program and what problem they are solving. So, first let's hear from Titan Protection. Let me see if I can play this video. So, Ryan from Titan Protection is the CEO at Titan has been working with drones for your years and they have built a successful program in the US and they have been deploying autonomous drone at a scale for a number of customers. >> I have been following >> Bing, can you confirm if you can see the video? >> in drones in physical security and certainly here at Titan for several years **[25:02]** starting back in 2012 when I got my first drone and Inspire 1 from DJI and really have been wrestling with how do we use these pieces of equipment technology in physical security specifically and we needed three things. We needed the regulations to be able to allow us to operate these drones remotely. We needed a security operations center so that we could operate them remotely. We also needed a docking station that we could charge and deploy the drones from remotely. We've been able to now actually deploy these things in real situations and we've learned a lot along the ways. We got our waiver a couple years ago that allowed us to fly beyond visual line of sight. That allowed us to actually scale and start to operate as opposed to going a site-by-site waiver process that was really a bottleneck for us. We really put a lot of stock in having our national beyond visual line of sight waiver. Now the waiver process is becoming more template-ized. part 108 coming out that's going to replace part 107 in the waiver process. So we've really learned that that's not necessarily the value that we bring to our customers. It certainly is a piece but **[26:06]** we're finding the operational aspect of managing the pilots, managing the training, managing the maintenance and and shifting the burden of risk to a third party is really where we're seeing value to our clients. A lot of lessons learned in that piece. I think we tried out a lot of equipment that we thought would work that didn't work as planned [music] and we had to go through a lot of different iterations until we finally landed on a few solutions that worked really well. Some of that is our mobile surveillance units. We're using radar units. There's some different type of photoelectric beams and these types of different things that we're able to do that. But I will say our first couple of attempts at that failed. Some of the technology that we put faith into didn't perform out in the field as well as we thought. We learned to test this on our own for deploying it and and building some confidence before we're selling it or putting it in front of customers. Kind of along the lines of just our company's model and envision of blending people and technology, we're finding that happen a lot more with the drone than I expected is **[27:06]** that we're we're getting in a lot more of of that blending together. What we call kind of the Goldilocks effect of finding the right blend of people and technology to meet the needs, you know, the certain price point, but still having the appropriate security posture for a for a customer and we're seeing that continue with the drone as well. We are focusing more around centering around operations and being hardware agnostic and really focusing on the program and letting those types of things evolve. Same conversation with part 108 and beyond visual line of sight, there's a lot of changes in that regulation that are currently happening, a couple unknowns and those types of things. So, that leads to some uncertainty from customers, but that also is a reason why they gravitate towards us is that is a burden that we bear and we go through all of that as far as staying on the the tip of the iceberg as far as what may be coming down regulation-wise for both equipment and then also regulation piece. That's another big value in having a third-party provider is **[28:07]** customer gets the benefit of the equipment, being able to use it, getting the data, but not really having to deal with the complexity of the regulations, the hardware systems, and this type of thing. Lesson learned is really to be flexible in that scenario and to certainly watch and stay educated on it, but continue to watch and see how it unfolds as both of those conversations >> [music] >> continue to evolve. >> So, that was uh Ryan Smith from Talon Production. Uh Ryan and his team would be speaking today at length. You can ask them questions uh and understand more of how you can leverage their service and how they build this program. Uh we would be also hearing from our partner Noon. We saw them in the keynote where they have been deploying autonomous drones for providing vandalism and they have done uh drone deployments, 1,000 plus flights, 10 plus locations and they have helped **[29:08]** save damages and you can find more about them on on their LinkedIn page where they share a lot of stuff that they are doing for 24/7 security and they'll share more information today. They're based out of Netherlands. Uh we'll also hear from G4S today where one of the largest security companies in the world in Belgium they have been deploying it for Volvo and they are automating patrols. Um and the physical patrol which it used to take more than 300 minutes has now coming to less than an hour and 84% more or less patrol time is spent and you can do faster and we'll learn more about that at one of the sessions in our security track today from our partner N G4S. Um they would also talk about the exact numbers and share specifics. So please **[30:08]** register for that session and learn more of how they are deploying it. So now ball comes back to you. What's holding you back? Right? What is stopping you to get started with uh drone security at your business? If you already a security business the technology is very reliable. We have seen cases studies. We we'll see more sessions today. Um these could be four things. Uh you'd say hey I don't have any expertise in house. How would I get started? The hardware, permissions, the safety of it, the compliance, the liability feels really complex. Uh not sure if it fits our security platform. Maybe you have already built some software, your own AI. Uh not sure how to fit in. And then while you could feel there would be an ROI, I'm not able to define it. All right, this could be the things. And if you have these similar questions, drop them in chat. Uh and I'll try to answer uh or I'll help you guide to the right session where you can find this **[31:11]** answer today. Uh but these could be things which could be holding back. And so, let me try to attempt it. Uh I would say there are uh ways to get started. And I can give you a a playbook where how to get started with this kind of uh operations with autonomous drones. So, there are three questions. Uh one is we know security, not drones. How do we go about it? So, you don't need to become a drone company to start autonomous drones. You're a security company or you know security business really well. You can leverage local remote operation center partners. Uh and you can get them to run your entire drone program as a CAPEX. So, as an OPEX, sorry. Uh without investing capital expenditure, you can have it as an OPEX with a subscription. Uh you bring the customer the site, the security operation, they bring the drones. **[32:13]** They take the entire operations for you. They take the liability, they know the permissions. Uh that is actually the second question, that what about hardware permission safety? And it's all connected. Uh A lot of our partners uh offer all bundled in. Uh you don't need to hire pilots, you don't need to train them, you don't need to buy hardware. You need to focus on security and your customer. And will this exist fit your existing platform? Oh, yes. So, you can integrate with your VMS as I spoke about integrated alarms. And if you are in the environment where everything needs to go on premise with your secure server, yes, everything could be deployed there. So, the hardware, software, services, operations have been designed in a such a way that it could easily plug into your current operations. And this could really empower your current business teams and sales team to up your game in the security market to offer autonomous drones as a security. And over the last year, I've seen a lot of RFP RFPs **[33:17]** and tenders coming in from large companies and we'll hear about the actual case studies of companies who have deployed it where they're already considering this technology and looking to go at scale in next 12 months. Of course, you can start start with one site and a demo. Uh your closest customer you have technology showcase center. You need to of course have experience center that you could built in. You can partner with one of the remote operation centers and they can help you set it up where you can take your customers and you can show them how things could be deployed at scale. So, things have become really easy in a way with the entire ecosystem, the hardware getting reliable, a dedicated software like Skydio, a partner like FlytBase which which could work together with you, and local partner which can take care of the entire bundle offering with you. And all you need to do is work together with this partner to get started with program. Lot of them **[34:22]** also offer not just build and operate, but build, operate, transfer. So, say 1 year down the line or 3 years down the line, you want to transfer that program, they could work with you to build your internal program and gradually transfer the knowledge. So they can closely work with you at that scale and build the entire program internally. So that's the end of the session. Key takeaways, one is why now? Right now is the time. Drones and AI are at the forefront, available, production grade. This was not possible 2 years ago. So if you're planning for starting autonomous drone security, you have been planning, this is the time to get started. What's possible? Patrol, alarm responses, AI forensics, entire fleet is possible entire fleet of suite of features are available and workflows are available. It can get integrated with your security systems, your security software, video management system. We saw the proof of how companies are doing that. You can take their help if you are looking to build **[35:22]** that program and they can offer a turnkey OPEX model for your entire project. And if you want to learn more, you can drop me an email or here's a QR code to scan to go to my LinkedIn and drop me a message and there will be more information available at secure.FlytBase.com. So with that, we come to the end of the session. Let me see if you have any questions. Awesome. So let me see, let me go to uh some more questions here. Uh there are a few more. I I think we're up on time. Let me just take probably one of them. Uh there's question about counter drone came up. Can FlytBase detect a rogue drone? So yes, we integrate with several detect and avoid and counter drone systems **[36:24]** where Uh, you can see the airspace awareness one and second is you can also see the location of a RC pilot where you can send the drone to that particular location. There are so many questions. I would try to get an export of it and see how you can answer that. We are sorry, we are up on time and there are so many other sessions which are going on. So, I would need to be mindful of that. If you have these questions, you can just send it to me at achal@FlytBase.com. I will just drop my email ID here again. Or you can connect me on LinkedIn. Happy to answer that. Most of them could get answered if you attend different sessions which are there by these experts and you'll be able to learn more. So, I thank you so much. Sorry, I could not take all the questions because we end up on time. But yeah, please reach out to me or join different sessions to get those questions answered. I would be also available in the networking area. We have a **[37:27]** virtual networking area where you can connect with me and I'll be happy to answer your questions there. Thank you so much.