Every year in Australia, roughly 14 assessors are injured in falls during manual roof inspections. Some of these injuries are career-ending. The insurance industry has known this for decades, but the alternative, refusing to inspect roofs, was never commercially viable. Claims need evidence. Insurers need documentation. The roof has to be seen.
Drone imagery changed the equation. A pilot on the ground captures higher-resolution imagery than any assessor on a ladder, covers the entire roof surface in minutes rather than hours, and eliminates the single largest source of workplace injury in the claims assessment workflow.
The accuracy argument
When we first deployed ARIS Detect with assessor teams in South-East Queensland, the pushback was predictable: 'You can't see hail damage properly from the air.' The data told a different story.
In a controlled comparison across 200 properties following the October 2024 Brisbane hailstorm, drone-captured imagery analysed by ARIS detected 23% more damage instances than manual ladder inspections on the same properties. The reason is straightforward, a drone at 15 metres altitude with a 48MP sensor captures the entire roof surface at sub-centimetre resolution. An assessor on a ladder sees the area within arm's reach.
The detection gap was most pronounced on complex roof geometries, hip roofs with multiple ridges, properties with second-storey sections that are difficult to access safely, and low-pitch commercial roofs where walking creates its own damage risk. These are precisely the properties where manual inspection is most dangerous and least thorough.
Time on site
A typical manual hail damage inspection takes 90 to 120 minutes on site. The assessor arrives, sets up the ladder, climbs, photographs individual damage points, climbs down, repositions, repeats. Weather delays are common, you cannot safely climb a wet tile roof.
A drone capture of the same property takes 8 to 12 minutes. The pilot launches from the driveway, flies a pre-programmed grid pattern, and lands. The imagery is uploaded to ARIS from the field. By the time the pilot has driven to the next property, the AI detection pass is already complete.
For a panel assessor running 4 to 6 inspections per day, drone capture with AI detection effectively doubles their daily throughput. This matters enormously during catastrophe events when claim volumes spike and settlement timelines compress.
The compliance dimension
Insurers are increasingly requiring photographic evidence of the entire roof surface, not just the damaged areas the assessor chose to photograph. A drone capture inherently provides this. Every tile, every ridge cap, every valley is documented. If a dispute arises six months later about pre-existing damage versus storm damage, the complete imagery record exists.
This is a material shift in how claims evidence works. The historical model, assessor takes 30 photos of what they consider relevant, creates an incomplete record that favours neither party. Full-surface drone imagery creates a complete, timestamped, geo-referenced record that can be re-analysed at any point.
Resistance and adoption
The transition is not without friction. Many experienced assessors have built careers around their ability to identify damage by touch and sight at close range. Asking them to trust a camera on a drone and an AI model feels like a demotion.
The most successful deployments we have seen treat drone imagery and AI detection as tools that augment the assessor's judgment, not replace it. The assessor still reviews every finding, confirms or rejects every detection, and writes the narrative section of the report. What changes is how the evidence is captured and how consistently it is documented.
Organisations that frame this as 'the AI does your job' see resistance. Those that frame it as 'you never have to climb a ladder again, and your reports are better' see adoption rates above 85% within the first quarter.
What the numbers show
Across the ARIS platform in 2025, properties inspected via drone imagery showed a 34% reduction in claim disputes compared to manually inspected properties in the same portfolios. Report turnaround time dropped from an average of 3.5 days to under 4 hours. Zero assessor injuries were recorded on drone-inspected claims.
The safety case was always clear. The accuracy case is now proven. The efficiency case speaks for itself. The question is no longer whether drone imagery will replace ladder inspections for hail damage claims, it is how quickly the remaining holdouts will adopt it.
ARIS Detect Team
Engineering