Somehow, we are less than a month from this year’s Commercial UAV Expo, being held back at Caesars Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, September 1-3. To start, it’s worth looking at a session around how large utilities are scaling, entitled Building Drone Programs That Hold Up in the Real World of Energy and Utilities. The program also gets into the mechanics of scaling itself with Before You Scale: The Operational, Technical, and Strategic Realities of Building a Drone Program, a session spanning drone-in-a-box deployment across four very different contexts. Taken together, the session makes a clear case that the hardest part of scaling a drone program usually isn't the aircraft. Six sessions, five industries, and one consistent thread: enterprise drone programs are no longer being judged on whether they can fly.