What Goldman Sachs and PwC Actually Found About Drone Inspection ROI in Insurance

When major analyst firms outside the drone industry itself start quantifying the impact of aerial inspection on insurance operations, that's a meaningfully different kind of validation than a vendor's own case study. Here's what the actual numbers say.

What Goldman Sachs found

A Goldman Sachs analysis estimated that drone use in insurance could generate roughly 10% savings on claim adjustment expenses industry-wide, amounting to approximately $6.8 billion globally. That's not a per-carrier estimate or a best-case scenario from a single deployment, it's an industry-wide projection from a firm whose business is financial analysis, not drone technology sales.

What PwC found

PwC separately projected that aerial drone imagery could reduce building inspection time by up to 50%, and separately assessed that drone usage could improve underwriting accuracy by 40-60%. Two distinct findings from the same analysis: faster inspections, and more accurate ones, not a tradeoff between speed and quality, but improvement on both dimensions simultaneously.

What Allianz reported about actual current use

Perhaps the most concrete data point: Allianz reported that 61% of its risk managers are already using drone-collected data in day-to-day operations. That's not a projection or an estimate of future potential, it's a report of current, everyday use by risk management professionals at one of the world's largest insurers, which tells you this has already moved well past pilot-program status at scale.

Why this combination of sources matters

A single vendor case study can be cherry-picked or unrepresentative. Three independent sources, two major financial analyst firms and one of the world's largest insurers reporting on its own internal usage, reaching consistent conclusions about meaningful efficiency and accuracy gains is a substantially stronger evidentiary basis than any single source alone.

Why this should change how insurance leaders frame the investment case

If your organization is still evaluating whether aerial inspection is worth investing in, the honest framing based on this data isn't "should we experiment with this", it's "we're already behind if 61% of risk managers at a major global insurer are using this in daily operations and we're not." The industry-wide $6.8 billion savings estimate isn't hypothetical upside; it's an indication of how much value is already being left on the table by carriers who haven't adopted this yet.

The practical takeaway

When building an internal business case for aerial inspection adoption, lead with these independently sourced, industry-wide figures rather than relying solely on a single vendor's claims, Goldman Sachs, PwC, and Allianz aren't in the business of overstating drone technology's value, which makes their alignment on this specifically credible.

This is a focused look at one part of a much larger picture, read the complete guide to aerial underwriting and claims documentation for the full picture on disclosure requirements, catastrophe response, and building a recurring program. See the Annual Insurance Intelligence Program™ for current pricing.