Flight to Insight: How AEP Ohio is using drones & AI to turn inspections into uptime

Synopsis

One missed defect on a critical structure can mean millions in outage costs and penalties. See inside American Electric Power’s inspection program and how they use autonomous drones and computer vision to find problems earlier, cut truck rolls, and keep crews off hazards.

Hear from AEP Ohio's drone program manager, Jake Reed, as he walks through how AEP designed and scaled their program, from first pilots to daily operations. Jake explains how Levatas's computer vision automatically recognizes and flags defects so alerts reach the right teams without hours of manual video review. You'll also see how Skydio autonomous drones and Skydio Cloud stream live inspection feeds to operations centers and sync data into Levatas and other systems of record, enabling inspections at scale.

What to expect:

• Learn how AEP’s workflow goes from flight to automated defect detection to routed alerts with less human intervention
• See where AEP is replacing manual climbs, truck rolls, and helicopter hours with standardized digital inspections
• Examples of real inspection data, the defects Levatas flags, and how those insights feed maintenance and storm preparation
• A live remote flight of the Skydio and Levatas inspection solution, followed by an open discussion of what has worked and what AEP would change starting from zero