The energy sector is working hard to meet the dual pressures of climate resilience and operational efficiency, and one company is leading the charge in critical infrastructure inspection.
As energy providers seek smarter, faster ways to monitor their assets, Unleash live has become a force in real-time video analytics and drone automation, taking out the top spot at the 2025 Australian Financial Review’s AI Award in the productivity and efficiency category.
Energy sat down with Unleash live Group Chief Executive Officer, Hanno Blankenstein, in the lead up to Australian Energy Week (17–20 June) to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are redefining infrastructure management, from powerlines and transmission towers to wind turbines and solar farms.
How is Unleash live’s platform helping the energy sector?
The challenges faced by utilities have not changed. Safety, reliability and efficiency continue to drive the agenda, with many investing in drone technology.
That’s where we come in.
Simply put, we automate the data collection and analysis for asset management processes using machine learning, cameras and drone automation.
Our platform connects virtually any camera to real-time, machine-learning AI apps that produce insights such as condition assessments. For utilities, that ranges from fast, automated image capture via drones, to computer vision machine learning models that improve fault detection on widely dispersed, costly-to-maintain assets, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) reporting of the network condition.
It means utilities can inspect thousands of poles, wires, towers, substations and other assets with greater speed and accuracy and, importantly, without putting crews at risk.
The results speak for themselves: lower inspection costs, faster fault detection, reduced downtime and improved safety. We do this across a range of sectors within energy, including fault detection on large solar farms, wind turbine blade condition assessment and industrial machinery.
Essentially, we can automate and speed up any manual visual inspection process that takes up precious time.
What can we expect in your new video case study at Australian Energy Week?
We’re excited to showcase a case study featuring one of Australia’s largest utilities, serving more than three million customers in bushfire-prone regions. This client has completely transformed its inspection process using autonomous drones and our Autofly technology.
Previously reliant on helicopters, this utility now conducts faster, quieter and more precise inspections using drones, cutting costs and dramatically reducing bushfire risk.
We’re screening the full video at our booth and discussing how other networks can adopt this scalable model.
Can you tell us about Autofly and how it fits into your technology stack?
Autofly is at the heart of the productivity gains realised by customers such as Endeavour Energy and many other utilities worldwide. As a connected ground control station (GCS) application, Autofly supercharges pilots by providing efficiency capabilities that aren’t available in standard GCSs, such as DJI’s Flighthub2.
These include one-click capture of pre-defined assets for fast, repeatable and structured data collection; zero latency live streaming to any browser for real-time remote collaboration; and real-time synchronisation of media assets.
This is enabled through a purpose-built cloud-based media management tool, specifically designed to integrate with our machine learning applications and your ERP systems to analyse and generate insights from the assets inspected.
We have flown millions of assets many thousands of automated flight kilometres, achieving benefits such as three times the number of fault detections, an 80 per cent reduction in CO2, and a 78 per cent reduction in time using automation and reporting when compared to manual drone flights.
Can you tell us more about the use of AI?
Unleash specialises in a branch of AI known as computer vision. We’re focused on the end-to-end pipeline, from capturing the images and video right through to analysing and reporting the data. This means we work with very specific datasets.
Unlike broader large language model fields such as ChatGPT that use publicly available material as training data, we accelerate our customers’ capture of high-quality imagery in a structured and automated manner, which results in high performance machine learning models specific to our customers’ datasets.
We know there can be concerns about security and privacy when using third-party AI tools, so I’d like to highlight here that Unleash offers the option for our customers to wholly own their models.
I might be biased, but if you ask me, Unleash is the ultimate digital pipeline for delivering vision-based data insights – and it’s deployable across an unlimited number of use cases. Our customers find this pretty powerful.
What makes Unleash live stand out in the energy tech space?
For the Australian market, quite a lot. Our headquarters are in Barangaroo, Sydney, and since 2016 we’ve worked with many of the industry’s leading players. This has given us a wealth of expertise addressing local cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and SOCI-related matters. We understand the regulatory environment and can add a degree of ‘local insight’ to our offering.
I’d also like to reiterate that although Unleash is a software company, our key focus is using data analytics to drive productivity and efficiency gains in operational workflows.
What are you looking forward to most about Australian Energy Week this year?
We’re looking forward to meeting energy leaders, field teams, and asset managers at the show to hear about the challenges they’re facing in asset management.
You’ll be able to visit us at booth A2 to view the full case study, see the latest DJI M4 drone, and talk with our team, including Hamid Fardoost, our ANZ CEO, and Richard Braithwaite, our Field Solutions Specialist.
We’re proud to have won an AFR AI Award and we’re even prouder of our impact in delivering real productivity gains and safer infrastructure.
The future is predictive, and we’re helping the energy sector get there.
For more information, visit unleashlive.com/utilities, or chat with the team at booth A2 at Australian Energy Week from 18–19 June at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
