The headline speaker at the annual conference hosted by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International is a good indicator of who’s on the rise in a small drone industry that is rapidly morphing from renegade to mainstream. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich gave the opening-day keynote at this year’s Xponential conference in Dallas, not for the first time revealing the drone ambitions of the $59 billion corporation.

Krzanich, who also chairs the FAA’s blue-ribbon Drone Advisory Committee, rolled to the stage on Intel’s Loomo Segway-style robot. Borrowing from the playbook of a Silicon Valley developers conference, the keynote featured a drone light show and a simulated bridge inspection performed, respectively, by Intel’s Shooting Star and Falcon 8+ machines.

“Data is the new oil,” a commodity that will be delivered through automated, interconnected systems in the air and on the ground, said Krzanich, in evangelist mode. “By 2020 there’s going to be incredible amounts of data that are going to be produced by all these connected things…For a single drone flight, the estimate is that about 50 gigabytes of data can be collected. Since drones can fly multiple flights per day, this translates into terabytes of data daily.”