Transforming Industries with AI-Powered Drones: A Q&A with Dr. Shaun Passley, Chairman and CEO of ZenaTech

I’m an entrepreneur and company builder focused on engineering and scaling technology solutions that modernize traditional industries. As Chairman and CEO of ZenaTech, trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ZENA, I lead a fast growth technology company focused on AI-powered drones, drone-based services, and enterprise software for commercial, government, and defense markets.

Our business spans three core areas. Through ZenaDrone, we design and manufacture specialized autonomous drone platforms, including our flagship ZenaDrone 1000. Through our Drone as a Service business, we provide organizations in the US and in global locations, subscription and usage-based drone-powered services while managing the aircraft, pilots, regulatory compliance, data capture, and analytics. This allows industries such as land surveying and infrastructure inspection to benefit from advanced drone technology without taking care of the cost and complexity of ownership and operations. We also provide enterprise software productivity solutions providing steady recurring revenue as well as a strong data and engineering foundation that the drone side leans on.

Build around real-world problems. I built my first software, College Plan, in my dorm room as a college freshman, after watching everyone line up and flip through a thick catalogue just to register for classes. The strongest innovations crack a clear operational challenge and deliver measurable improvements.

Leaders should be deliberate about turning that idea into something that can actually last, which means building the people, processes, and organizational structure around it. At ZenaTech, that principle guides how we develop and deploy AI-powered drones across commercial, government, and defense applications. Whether we are modernizing traditionally manual workflows through Drone as a Service or developing autonomous systems for defense, we focus on making advanced technology practical, scalable, and adaptable to evolving customer needs.

For other leaders and founders, my advice is to stay close to your end user, understand where the real friction is, and keep building as the markets change around you. Long-term growth requires a strong product and an organization capable of evolving with it.

The biggest driver of growth for ZenaTech has been our rapid expansion through strategic acquisitions paired with growing market demand for subscription-based autonomous technology.

The Drone as a Service market is growing rapidly, with analysts projecting the sector could reach $355 billion by 2032. We are capitalizing on this momentum by acquiring established service companies in fields like surveying and infrastructure and integrating our AI-powered drones and software directly into their existing operations.

This allows us to modernize traditionally manual workflows, improve speed and precision, and expand our DaaS network through businesses that already have established customers and revenue. This approach also reflects how we think about sustainable growth more broadly. Scaling is about building on proven operations and creating a structure that can support continued expansion.

We recognized that just selling drones wasn’t going to get us very far. Scaling effectively required us to go beyond providing drone hardware and address the operational challenges that can prevent organizations from adopting the technology at scale. For many enterprise and government customers, fleet maintenance, staffing, regulatory compliance, and data management can create significant barriers to adoption.

To address those challenges, we built our Drone as a Service model to take that weight off customers, from aircraft and pilots to compliance, data capture, and analytics. We also invested in workforce transformation and backend operations, training licensed professionals, including surveyors and inspectors, to integrate autonomous systems into their existing workflows which providing centralized and faster data analytics of drone data for efficiencies and safety. That combination of technology, operational support, and industry knowledge in an AI autonomy platform, has helped us create a model that can scale across locations and use cases. As a company grows, the systems and processes supporting the original idea have to mature with it. Building that infrastructure has been essential to turning ZenaTech’s technology into a repeatable, sustainable business model.

As ZenaTech grew into a publicly traded company, and we have grown our products, manufacturing operations, office locations, and teams to provide solutions targeted to commercial, government, and defense markets, my day-to-day changed a lot. I used to be hands-on in nearly every part of the business, now I am focusing more on long-term vision and the next stages of execution to make sure the whole organization is pulling in the same direction.

As we’ve expanded, particularly in our product set targeted to defense, certification and defense agency engaagment, and getting placed on procurement lists have become especially important. Additionally, we are scaling our Drone as a Service network through acquisitions while continuing to advance our drone technology and enterprise software businesses. My role today is to keep all that aligned around our broader strategy, while giving our teams the direction and accountability they need to execute effectively. Part of building a sustainable enterprise is creating an organization that does not depend on one person to make every decision. As a leader, that means establishing clear structures, empowering your teams, and staying aligned as the business becomes more complex.