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Considering the traffic issue in Karachi, the unreliability of some delivery staff, various legal implications involved in the instant nature of delivery and the risk to delivery staff life, we wondered how soon the market can expect drone delivery.To gain a market need perspective, I spoke to the men behind leading instant delivery & fast food empires.

Reason for that is you yourself mentioned “legal” implications, which I’d wonder about and if and how the FAA would be worried about drones flying around the city for commercial purposes and such; I’m guessing airspace violations would be something of concerns to them?

Secondly, the usage of drones would mean exacting GPS-based location detection for each client, and that each client is using an e-commerce transaction and paying for the same at the time of purchase, online. Even with some upcoming solutions, the country is lacking in that part as well still I believe.

I think the person-to-person interactivity that occurs during a delivery would lead to a large difference in how the transaction occurs, and it’d be very interesting to see how that effects our market where people still at times can go to an e-commerce store to check the pricing of their required product, and still go to a brick and mortar of their own choice to buy it.

I think people make the business and if you don’t need delivery staff then you’d need technically savvy staff that’d know how to deal with a drone, how to set up the deliveries, locations, wear and tear, issues, tracking and such as well. The cap-ex also is higher!

It’d be quite tough for us, let’s say to deliver a cake / dessert / beverage from a restaurant, and then make sure that the restaurant’s staff is trained and careful enough to package the food the correct way on a drone! Unsure how comfortable they’d be! I say this since even now at times we speak with businesses and they’d rather call up a real person and book an order as compared to book it online on our portal.

Considering the fact that Pakistani market is well aware of the current traffic situation, we still believe such technology can be introduced here. Now if the current market is ready or not we can be judged easily as now faster things are preferred more rather than slower ones. People here have started living on the go and food is something that needs to be there when you’re hungry.

So yes the market may be ready but before introducing this technology firstly the terminology “drone” should be more clarified to the people as specifically in this part of the world it is considered to be a negative word. Secondly where ever money is involved we tend to analyze it more closely and by nature Pakistani market is more comfortable to pay to a human being rather than a machine, if you talk about masses.

Also the challenges need to be addressed at the first place such as Miss Use, this is one major factor which will be the most important barrier to its launch in this part of the world.

Government might need to take some serious measures to ensure security and proper usage of this technology. Now once the technology is introduced even then it needs proper attention and surveillance. So responsibilities of the food industry will increase to almost double.

Talking about the delivery staff, I particularly believe that this technology might need more people to operate and overlook the entire process. So the people riding bikes must be trained to operate a drone via joystick or even the ones having GPRS technology would need people to follow up and overlook the entire process.

Pakistani market is full of surprises, you never know this might be the game changer of the entire delivery business in Pakistan, people here would really appreciate a faster delivery process. It will be really positive for the businesses which are entirely based on delivery such as us 14th Street Pizza we are happy when our customer receives the order before the mentioned time.

Furthermore a timeline to introduce this technology would be really hard to provide, but considering the fact that we are the pioneers of innovation in the Pizza Market we might just surprise you any moment by introducing the Drone for delivery. However, this type of service would still take a few more years to become a reality, especially in Pakistan.