Arborists are asked to climb higher, cut faster, and do more with fewer people. The work is physically brutal, structurally complex, and often performed in exposed positions aloft. The result is a safety crisis and a workforce challenge that the industry can no longer absorb.
The tree care industry carries a serious human cost. Published safety analyses report an average of about 61 fatal occupational injuries per year in recent years, with estimated fatality risk far above the all-industry average. Utility-arboriculture reporting also cites severe retention pressure, with very high annual turnover and especially high first-year loss rates.
Utility vegetation management is a multi-billion-dollar annual requirement, and outage impacts scale far beyond crews in the field. Public-power reporting ties a meaningful share of outages to tree-related causes, while DOE-cited estimates place U.S. outage costs around $150B annually. This is not just a labor issue; it is a reliability and public-safety challenge.
Move arborists out of the most exposed canopy positions while keeping control and decision-making on the ground.
Help crews complete more jobs per week by reducing fatigue and making high-risk tasks more operationally repeatable.
Use autonomous technologies to extend what skilled arborists can do, not replace the arborist’s role or judgment.
Standardize high-risk workflows so crews can deliver safer, repeatable performance across more jobs and conditions.
Preserve arborist craft and field expertise while reducing risk in the parts of the job where exposure is highest.
