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The Investing Intel Podcast has been created with one mission: To inform investors about diverse sectors and topics.
In each episode, host Duncan Ferris chats with an industry expert to find out what's really going on, with the aim of helping listeners to learn about businesses and technologies they might never have considered investing in.
New episodes will be available every month.
The Investing Intel Podcast is brought to you by ValueTheMarkets. Visit valuethemarkets.com for more analysis, news and investing ideas.
Duncan: So, hello Cameron Chell, the president and CEO of Draganfly. Welcome to the show today.
Cameron: Thanks so much for having me Duncan.
Duncan: How are you? How are you doing? Everything okay with you are?
Cameron: Yeah, yeah, yeah, things are good. Super busy. It's it's early in the morning here, so this time works great and I look forward to the opportunity to speak with you. Thanks for the opportunity.
Duncan: No worries. I just sort of first wanted to start, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your your career in defense and aerospace?
Cameron: Sure. So you know, serial entrepreneur and product architect is generally the role that I fill within the organizations I've gotten to work with. And so, you know, back in the very early two thousands, late nineties designed in built a company with a great team called FutureLink which was the original, original cloud computing company. So this is the company that was the first company that took software and put it on servers and then used the thing, this thing called the internet back then to dial up and access this software.
Typically, we were using accounting software auditors were going in and doing audits, but back then computers were the size of sewing machines and you know, the laptops or the transportable they call them, so and we got really lucky and did a deal with Microsoft and then great planes and, and you know, and the.com happened and, and we were off and running.
And then got involved deeply in the payment space and did some design and and some finance work and around that. And then, fast forward a number of different projects, but as it relates specifically to aerospace built a, a company with a couple of other partners called Earth Cast.
And what we did at Earth Cast is we took video cameras and we installed them on the outside of the International Space Station. And so it's the first video ever from space. And so both in one meter and three meter resolution. And so, because it was the only video from space and it was on a very unique platform being the International Space Station, it was incredibly unique data.
And so we would sell this data to governments and hedge funds and the ministries of interiors and coast Guards and, you name it, it was just and so those cameras are still up and operational on the International Space Station today. And then about 12 years ago I started building drones and and came across Draganfly and, and put an investment group together and bought the company.
But I had been following the company for years and years. I mean, Draganfly is the original drone manufacturer and, technically I believe, today it is the oldest commercial drone manufacturer in the world. Not so much cuz it was maybe the first. It was certainly amongst the first, but it's the only one that survived this long.
Duncan: Wow. So you've come down a bit in altitude from space to like beyond lower orbit with what you're working on and you're in the atmosphere now.
Cameron: Yeah, I'm in the atmosphere. Sure. Yeah.
Duncan: Nice. And what can you tell me about what makes Draganfly and the products that Draganfly produces? What makes the company unique? What does the company get up to?
Cameron: My own personal philosophy is the only competitive differentiator a company has is its culture.
It is eventually your price, your IP, your innovation, your insight. All of those types of things are all only a function of the culture of the company that you build. And so being a company that's 25 years old in that time our original founder has retired.
But other than that, there's only two other employees that have ever left. So we have an incredibly strong and deep bench in the organization on our engineering side and our product development side. We're really, really deep in the industry in terms of like the innovation and people who are well placed, looking for things that need to get designed.
So, we tend to get really tough problems the opportunity to work on really tough problems. So as a company, we're a full solution provider. And even though at this point, even though we are, we're now growing at a a breakneck pace. It's incredible what's unfolding. But even though we're still really quite a small company, we have the ability to do what most companies certainly end-to-end, can't do, and it's because we have so many people that have so much well-rounded knowledge.
We definitely have specialists in the company, but we have a very, very strong bench of people that know everything, if that makes sense. Like everything about the industry, everything about every piece of engineering, everything about every piece of like communications. So we can do things that for our customers that most companies just can't do.
So now how that's played out in the market that's become really important is, data and security. So because you're collecting so much incredible data and security is so important. The customers that are dealing with us anyways are looking for organizations that can deal with everything from like design to services, to analytics of data.
And because you have to have all the right clearances, all the right classifications, all the right bonding, they don't want their data. It's the most important asset that these companies have. They do not. They want to know every single step of the value chain of that data.
And so that's one of the things that Draganfly can do that we seem to be very unique in the industry.
Duncan: Great, great. And your products as well seem to have really quite broad applications. Like most people, I don't know, thinking about drones, might think of them maybe as something that's used on a battlefield or maybe something that's used for recreation.
I'm sure we all saw a couple of years ago when Amazon started touting delivering packages with drone. But really there's so many different uses aren't there that Draganfly is involved in.
Cameron: I'm in this 10, 15 hours a day, and it almost seems like daily there's a new really important use case that comes up that hasn't been thought of that because you did this, now you can do this.
So it's really I really do see, being the age I am, I see the drone industry coming up to the same inflection point as, as I'll call it, the internet industry, where when the internet first came out we thought email was the killer application.
And today society would've a tough time operating without the internet. We've become so dependent on it. So many innovations are built on it. And yeah, that would've been very hard to imagine. Backed up, like the utility of the internet being what it is today.
And so I think somewhat the utility of the drone industry is like, Hey, this is novel. That's great. There's lots of cool things. You can deliver packages. You can collect some data that is so much deeper than that. This is a core piece of infrastructure that will weave into our actual social economics of how we operate and how we live and how we expect things to operate around us.
And so the use cases are absolutely enormous. Speaking to that a little bit as it relates to the latest products that we came out with. We released three new products this year and early next year we'll have three new more products coming out.
But each of our products this year are really designed as platforms. And so the most popular of which, which we just can't keep up with demand right now, is what we call our three XL. So this is, this is a drone that's about the size of a coffee table, but it's still under 55 pounds.
Now, the reason that's important is it's still considered a small unmanned aerial vehicle by FAA regulations and such. Now, the efficiency of this drone is really quite incredible. So it's about a 23 pound drone that can carry 25 pounds of payload. So it's carrying more than any, and it's got a flight time of about an hour.
And it's got a huge battery pack and we can multiple sensors and the idea behind this drone in particular is that basically for the industry it's already has 17 different payloads that can just snap onto this thing integrated with software. It's a universal drone, so anything can just fit onto this thing on the rails and on the universal mounts.
So I kind of liken it to the Humvee of the nineties or the Jeep of World War 2. It's like that's the base utility vehicle and then everything else you need to strap onto this thing. Now certainly there's gonna be other use cases, but if you wanna fly a small drone down inside of a mine, this isn't the drone to use.
But for 80% of the other use cases out there, it's not the drone. That's the most important thing. If you've got the right platform, which this is, the most important thing at that point becomes what payloads are you putting onto this? What sensors can you run with it? What's integrated on the software?
How, how secure is the data transmission? Those types of things become most important.
Duncan: Hmm. And I suppose that means you don't have to focus on any one particular niche. If you're building a platform like that, you can. You can attempt to exploit all of those different use cases really.
Cameron: Well you can now we have subject matter expertise in each one of these industries and actually in subsections of those industries.
So, that’s Draganfly's overall strategy. Five years from now, certainly and hopefully will be known as a drone company. But the reality is even almost today and certainly five years from now, we're a data company.
So, we have our own data facility or infrastructure and so more and more what we see is a customer comes to us and they may be looking for the life cycle of a customer. And it's maturing quickly is like, oh, we wanna buy a drone. We have three pilots. We have this, you know, we're a forestry company. We want to go fly. Our reserve and and understand where we want to fly a LIDAR mission so we can understand the topographics and where we're gonna cut a road in.
And once they get some exposure to that, we've done some training with them inside of a year. It's more like they've got three pilots, but they're hiring five of our pilots and we're delivering to them not just a topographical map of their reserve, but we're in that sewing missions, we're doing disease analysis, we're doing yield analysis, we're doing water table analysis, we're doing air quality analysis.
We're doing like all kinds of things and we're delivering terabytes of data to them on every single mission. And the data and the information they're getting is completely revolutionizing their business and their decision process. But they're a forestry company. They're not an IT company. They're not a data analytics company.
So more and more what we see is they're saying, Hey, can you house that data for us? Can you manage our permissions? Can you handle our security? Can, can you help apply data scientists into this?
And so, so we have six areas of expertise currently that range from you know, mine detection, like landmine detection, which we do very actively in the Ukraine, right through to forestry to mining exploration in particular for battery metals right through to long form infrastructure and in each of those areas we have either developed proprietary sensors or software or AI that enables us to deliver data to our customer that they can't get anywhere else.
So now we're an incredibly important part of their value chain note to their customers. And, and that's where we're gonna continue to do. So whether it's with our military customers or whether it's with our resource customers or whether it's with our law enforcement customers, we're gonna continue to follow that strategy so that we're in, that we're a critical, critical part of the data and the decision process that they run their organizations with.
Our overall objective is to make them more competitive. Like, if we do that for our customers, then we've done our job.
Duncan: Well, that's really interesting. And it makes me wanna jump forward a little bit in the questions I was gonna ask because think about all this stuff to do with data and helping your customers with it. It makes me think about how AI has just jumped on the scene this year and blown things apart in a lot of ways.
What kind of ramifications does AI have, not just for your company, but for the defense industry as a whole? We've seen it cropping up in a number of areas, but do you have any insight you can offer on how AI might change the future of your company and other companies in the space?
Cameron: Yeah. So we've had an AI bench for years and the insight for us to be able to have stood up an AI bench which is really driven by the fact that underlying AI is data. And without data, AI is useless. But the more data you have, the more effective it is. Well, nothing collects data better than a drone.
So we, we've been able to early on see the value and, and where AI is gonna drive things because we collect so much data. So we stood up an AI bench, you know, to be able to utilize our data. And quite frankly, that's becoming, other than our culture, that's becoming our strategic differentiator.
So with us every AI engine eventually is going to kind of level out as a commodity where within one to three or four or 5%, whatever, they're all kind of gonna be the same. And somebody in AI is gonna like, lose their head and tell me how wrong that is.
But follow the logic, the differentiator for an AI engine is the data that you input into it. So if we put drones up and, and we're collecting 75 different types of data, whether it's environmental data, LIDAR data, visual data you know you name it just goes, noxious gas data, all at the same time.
And you're inputting that into your data sets as you're flying a forestry reserve or you're flying a combat theater or something like that you've got a strategic advantage. So for us as an example, a number of years ago, we had a sheriff's department during the pandemic approached this and said, Hey, could you from the drones, could you build some software, some machine vision software that would allow us to determine if people are wearing masks and social distancing.
The reason they wanted to do that is they wanted to correlate if there was any compliance with ordinance compared with outbreaks. So if there was areas where people weren't wearing masks, weren't social distancing, and there was an outbreak in that area, they also wanted to see if their public awareness campaign was working.
Did they need to change their messaging? Did they need to put up more billboards? Did they need to put resources on the ground in order to help enforce the ordinance. And so anyway, we got a great result out of that. And they learned a lot of incredible data or a lot of incredible information that a lot of the changes in some of their tactics.
So one of the officers on deployment, she said to us, well, this is really cool, but, and she kind of said it kiddingly, she said could you detect Covid 19? And we all, we all kind of laughed.
And so fast forward nine months later. Our cameras, we're able to using data science and AI, they can read heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, blood or level heart rate variability, and of course if you've got a thermal device or a camera on their sensor, then you can get your temperature too.
Now, those are all the characteristics that determine if you've got infectious condition. So yes.
So AI has allowed us to use cameras now to determine if there's an infectious condition. So or the health of a survivor in a search and rescue operation, or the health of a combatant or a wounded soldier or the stress levels of combatants that maybe you know, you're working with or for, or against or whatever in a battlefield, now the technology itself has actually now been deployed.
We've deployed it into correctional facilities, as a prisoners being taken in a facility rather than having to have guards in there and, and medical staff putting on blood pressure bands and taking temperatures and that type of stuff, which is a risky scenario that literally they come into the intake and they're not in the room, there's a camera and the camera's taking all the vital signs, right?
So the implications of that type of stuff and the innovation that comes out of AI is absolutely imperative. And so for us, it's absolute, it's a complete and total focus. And, and it really drove some of our product design right back to the you know, to our airframe. And that's why our airframe is so, so designed such a way that it carries so much battery.
Like, because we wanna run as many sensors as possible at the same time. So AI is really at the core of our product design.
Duncan: Yeah. Wow. And you can already see the influence certainly of drones in Ukraine. A lot of like footage and if you follow it closely, you see kind of like monitoring of like enemy positions and that kind of thing from drone footage going on in the conflict in Ukraine.
But I was wondering more broadly as well, what kind of effect does a major conflict like that have on the aerospace and defense industry?
Cameron: Yeah, complete and total acceleration. So certainly before Ukraine there was significant resistance or hesitation for larger budgets to move away from what I'll call it large aerospace platforms into small UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System).
So large manned systems, satellite integrated you know, multi command structures multi-billion dollar platforms, right? For everything from reconnaissance to tactical coverage, to whatever the case is, and so as much as the rest of the drone industry was saying, wait, wait, wait, wait.
There's another way that this could be done. It needed a proving ground. And Ukraine has accelerated that proving ground and, and proved it. So today what you see is that typically in a conflict or in a theater, air dominance is, is probably one of, if not the largest strategic factor to determine what the outcome of that theater is gonna be.
So if you, if you dominate that airspace, right, you dominate. You've got everything from tactics to information you own it. And so that's why there's so much effort put into that. But from 10,000 feet down, Airspace is now dominated by small UAS regardless of the size of the big systems you put up there.
You can put a billion dollar systems from 10,000 feet down, which is where most of your strategy and tactics need to happen from. It's all small UAS so these are all systems that are, you know, a million dollar system in that is like a massively expensive systems. So the most of these systems are like less than a hundred thousand dollars.
Right? And some of them, quite frankly are a couple thousand bucks. And that's really, this is bigger than the advent of the tank in World War I, by far. And the other piece of that is that nothing collects data better than a drone. And now what we're seeing is that nothing probably delivers precision ordinance better than a drone in that area.
So right now there's this arms race that's happening between drone, counter drone, drone, counter drone, and literally on a weekly basis the stakes are upping because the effectiveness of being able to have close quarter air coverage, close quarter data collection, close quarter, all of that type of stuff, like, and so readily available that it's such an inexpensive price is game changing.
So now what we're seeing is we're seeing military budgets obviously globally are exponentially growing right now because of the geopolitics that's happening, because of nationalization that's happening around the world, et cetera, et cetera. And within those budgets, we're seeing small UAS as a, if not the, primary focus.
You know, for cost reduction and for effectiveness and and such. So it's from that because you can listen, you can throw AI into these things and your automation factor, it's unbelievable. So I'm not sure if I'm exactly answering your question, but hopefully that gives a lay of the land of the impact that we've seen the Ukraine conflict exponentially move forward the small UAS industry.
Duncan: Yeah. Wow. And do you think that that's something that is kind of reflected more broadly across defense and aerospace? Aside from drones specifically. Or do you think drones have kind of been like the big winner kind of in terms of that?
Cameron: Well, they are certainly if you wanna call it the big winner and they're emerging as the big winner because airspace in theater is so precious, right?
So, there's gonna continue to be massive budget and focus in that area. However, you now see this, not that it wasn't prevalent before, but you now see this accelerating into other areas. It might be ground tactics, it might be underwater drones, it might be you know devices, like a basic autonomy right on the battlefield.
In all areas, whether that's ground, air, sea, cyber, you name it. Autonomy and AI is the big investment now.
Duncan: It's kind of reminiscent of like a lot of these new technologies that will kind of like become massive in the civilian space seem to start off as military innovations or think about even things like radar and lidar and stuff like that. A lot of it, it seems to start in the military space and then in the future you see it translating across to civilian use cases a lot more as well.
Cameron: Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think what's happened in the drone industry is that you saw autonomy or you saw unmanned happening at a military level. And then the drone space, the commercial drone space actually started in the hobby remote control space.
That’s where this whole thing started. And then that's emerged into some innovation that happened amongst hobbyists that created this quadcopter thing, which was a much more stable, fun platform to fly. And then, oh my gosh, If you could put a camera on that thing, now all of a sudden it had utility and so it grew commercially.
But now that the military application has been, I wouldn't say proven out. It's proving out. Those innovations as you have mentioned, are now accelerating back into the commercial space just even in terms of adoption, acceptance, adoption and now integration of, of all kinds of different technologies into, into the commercial environment.
Duncan: So looking from acceleration of investment and things like that to more sort of challenges like the conflict in Ukraine has created a lot of, particularly supply chain challenges for a lot of industries. Is that something that's true of of defense and aerospace as well?
And are there any other kind of really major challenges that the space is facing right now?
Cameron: Yeah, well, certainly supply chain is one and for lots of different reasons, in particular the geopolitical reasons and the dependence that the globe has had on Chinese manufacturing, and so foreign national manufacturing for any country, right?
So I'm not just talking about the NATO or the Five Eyes, but any country now, drones are just so absolutely critical to the strategy and tactics that we see a nationalization no matter, you know, who you're representing, you're seeing nationalization of that manufacturing internally.
But that also means that you need to have chip manufacturing internally. You need to have motor manufacturing internally. You need to have, and and previous to that, that was all that was. Those are global supply chains. And so the global supply chain got severely tested and, and broken through the, the pandemic, and now due to geopolitics.
There's this requirement to nationalize. Not nationalize, but to bring in to national borders, all of those things. And so when you've got requirements from your government saying, Hey, this entire unit has to be made, built, certified here. Everything from your motors to your cyber to everything else.
So that infrastructure to be able to do that and supply it at scale is really the thing that's been kind of constraining the industry. And it's so we've seen that ourselves. We could be 10 times our size. We'd never meet our demand.
Right now, not even close. And so our constraint right now is we upgraded one of our plants this year. We opened you just literally last month opened up a new plant and we're already at the spot where like, we gotta expand it again and expand it again.
And that's gonna be acommon theme for us for the next the next couple of years. So I'd say that's probably our biggest challenge, which quite frankly is a luxury challenge.
Duncan: It's, it's quite interesting one that that is, you're right, it really does seem to be a trend right now. We were talking to some folks the other day about energy security in Europe, which it's really the same kind of thing. Do you have the ability to produce the energy yourself rather than import it from Russia or somewhere that might just become unstable and then suddenly you're cut off.
Cameron: Yeah energy security, food security, data security, it's, it all of those things. This is the new reality. You're right.
Duncan: And sort of thinking about what retail investors can, how they can approach the industry now, like what do you think is attractive about aerospace and defense for a retail investor.
Cameron: I think what's very attractive about it is first of all the trend, right? So the massive budgets that are going into this. And if we look at again, the geopolitical space for the next 15 years, budgets as it relates to this are gonna continue to increase. And those things are not affected by recession.
These budgets are affected by geopolitics. And so depending on where you think that's going you know certainly based on the knowledge I have that the next 15 years is massive amounts of required spending. So that's the first thing is like industry trend.
The second thing is looking at the fact that, you've got these now companies within borders that have to be built. And so it's a different competitive landscape. Our competitor is no longer DGL and I like DGL. Most people in my space in North America have hate on for them.
I think they're an amazing company. They've done incredible things. I love a lot of their products. They're really, really solid and the engineering's incredible. But the reality is that's not necessarily our competition. And on the commercial side, I think a lot of their products should continue to be used and we support them and and on and on.
So, when you look at it from a retail inspect perspective, it's a very unique time. In particular in the drone industry and maybe other industries similar to us, where you go like, okay, hey, who's gonna be the new dominant player? Who's gonna be the new billion dollar player? Because in the next three years there's going to be two or three that will emerge as the billion dollar plus players kind of like the giants in the industry.
And that's our goal, like we've really are, are working to position ourselves is to be that number 1, 2, 3 kind of North American based player. And when, which if you understand the landscape, you go, Hey, maybe these, these companies right now are doing, you know, five to, you know, 25 million a year in revenue.
Incredibly small, right? But when you look at their pipelines and you look at what's happening in the world, These are the companies that are gonna be doing hundreds of millions of dollars literally in the next few years. And so from a retail perspective, I think, you know, the trend is the geopolitics and seeing how you can take advantage of that.
I don't know of a better industry to take advantage of that in than the drone industry. And, there's kind of like four or five public retail facing opportunities that people can can get invested in.
I would suggest that that a new emergent company coming up, a new startup getting into it, that's maybe getting newly public now and emerging out. It's all, I kind of feel like it's almost too late.
So, amongst those four or five bets out there, I think those that are public, there's a couple of 'em in there that are likely gonna be the winners and hopefully we're one of them.
Duncan: Would it, it seems like a space generally that has pretty high barriers to entry really. I mean, you talk about the immense technical knowledge that your team have and how well rounded that knowledge is. It must be very hard for some to kind of break in really.
Cameron: Sure, sure. That you need that wealth.
Interesting enough, anybody can put an airframe together. Anybody. You can go to the internet, you can figure out how to build a drone and you can get your parts and order 'em in. And all of a sudden you think you're a drone. I got this great idea. I'm gonna to, you know, do something for, I'm gonna put a camera on this and I'm in a hotspot for wildfires.
And, literally within a few months and 25 grand or 50 grand, you can build a drone and you think you're in the drone industry. You're talking about devices that are airplanes, so the FAA and Transport Canada as an example, and the UK and all the Five Eye nations.
These are aircraft. And so the testing that you have to go through to get them into a commercial sense, the liability aspects of your customers using your drones and the liability leading they have to face, that it's incredibly difficult. And a lot of people are saying, geez, Cam, you know, there's so much demand out there, why are you not scaling fast?
Like man, when you have to build you know, for forever, like you have to build something long-standing, lasting. It's like the development cycle and the regulatory cycle and everything is very, very complex and it's getting more complex, which for us is a good thing because it does create a barrier of entry.
So it's seemingly easy to get into this business. It's very hard to scale in this business, and it's very hard to get the tier one customers because of the regulatory environment. But if you can, you can become an incumbent and then everything from your margin to your ability to, to gain market shares very high potential.
Duncan: And you mentioned so much about geopolitics and in the wider space. The US government is a pretty big customer for their aerospace and defense industry. And I sort of wonder how much you think people who want to invest in the space should be paying attention to things like the debt ceiling crisis that that's happened recently and sort of military budgets and stuff.
Is that something that people really need to be keyed into?
Cameron: Well in this particular industry and as it relates to those types of things, this is the one area where it's recession proof and it's probably the one area where the debt ceiling isn't a factor. I mean, it's probably one of the things that's driving the debt ceiling, but it's a justifiable thing.
So it those those critical national security measures and means, and again, whether that's military, whether it's collecting data for the Department of Interior or whether it is oceans or whether it's any of that type of stuff. Environment. These are all critical like these are things that budgets are being, that's why the debt ceiling's being pushed.
And candidly, if we think about what brought us out of the Great Depression or out of the recessionary times in some of the, the seventies it was geopolitics, right?
It was war. Now, I'm not supportive of that in any way, but that is just the reality of where we're going, and that's why the spending in this area is gonna continue to increase.
Duncan: And just finally, I wondered if there's any sort of tips that you'd share for our retail investors. Any, anything in particular that you think they should really pay attention to within this space? Anything that's gonna be. Hot stuff or anything to monitor, that kind of thing.
Cameron: Yeah. So, I think innovations is always you know, something to watch. But it tends to be what a retail investor kind of keys on, oh, this is the coolest thing of innovation.
It's gonna take over, it's gonna do those types of things. And quite frankly, at this point for a retail investor, I think what they want to be looking at is customers. Which customers are signing up because right now in this phase of the industry and for the next couple of years, few years, while innovation's important come, what's more important is production.
So, right now we can come up with the greatest and, and we've got some incredible innovations that where it is like there's no point in even talking about them because right now we've got two generational like if we think about where our products could be today, we're still working super hard to meet the production demands of current market. Not even the the future market.
And so the, the organization that can best get product to market and scale that production for the customers is probably, that is the most strategically important thing right now. So, what does that mean? That means you have to have existing infrastructure.
You have to have existing resources, whether that's people or capital. You have to have existing customer bases. You have to have existing certifications, classifications. Yeah, all of that type of stuff, which it, which is a thing that takes years and years to get it. You know, it takes months to build the drone.
You can put new products together quickly, but to actually have a value chain that can provide the production numbers that are required by these customers, that's the real key. So I would look to the companies that are probably the most mature in that space and most likely to be able to deliver production, cuz those are who customers are gonna come back to.
So if new innovation starts happening in the industry it's, hopefully it's organizations like us that continue to innovate, but if somebody's out innovating us, which always happens in industry, we've got the distribution and the access to the customer. So, maybe we're hopefully able to go back in and do M&A deals or stuff like that and move those innovations through our value chain.
Duncan: Okay. No, that's really interesting. And there is one question that I sort of missed as well, and that was to do with, it can be quite a technical space certainly to try and get your head round. And I wonder if you think that that's something that might put off some investors, where they think, I'm not sure that I really understand it. And do you think, is that a concern for defense and aerospace companies?
Cameron: Well, I think, I'm complete completely biased, but I think it's quite the quite the opposite. Tech is what defines your innovative advantage within any industry that you're in.
So you might be in, in food security or agriculture or pharmaceuticals or retail or whatever it is. It's your tech innovation that's giving you that advantage in there. So in this particular space, there's so many nuances of technology that that can give you advantage. So, being able to establish a platform, which I think we've done in particular with our Commander three XL, this is a technology platform.
That coffee table size platform you know, drone system is what allows us to put you know, hundreds, if not, depending on how you think about it, thousands of innovations into particular use cases and, and industries. So, if an investor is afraid of technology, yeah, this probably is not a an area to be involved in.
But if they are one that recognizes and embraces, Hey, you know what, the impact that technology has within particular industries. This is probably the industry that will probably have the most applicability to cause effect. Into each one of those areas. So, one would argue, oh no, AI is gonna have the biggest effect now in the next 10 years or whatever.
But if you think about where AI is applied, this is probably one of those cases where you're gonna see it drive more in visibly into each one of those industries. Because AI is dependent on data. And nothing collects data better than a drone. You've got a drone that's, you know, in airspace, right?
So it's got three dimensional, it's got communication capability, it's got massive data packs, and you can, you can literally put on dozens of different sensors collecting multiple different types of data sets that can inform your AI engine. So and so the answer is, yeah, if, if you're intimidated by tech, you know, drone is not the place to be.
But if you recognize that tech, including AI is going to be driving the future, drone is probably the most poignant point where you can take advantage of all of those trends.
Duncan: Yeah, it sounds like a really exciting industry to be a part of and it's been a really interesting conversation. I just wanna thank you for coming on the show. That's all the questions I got for you today.
Cameron: Yeah, Duncan, thanks. Great. Thank you for the opportunity and and thanks for all that you guys do over there. You run a great show.
Duncan: No problem. Have a great day. Really nice to talk to you today. Thanks again.