AI might replace humans one day, but it hasn’t yet. The best operators are using AI to improve what they’re doing rather than replacing managers or cutting out human interaction.
After all, we’re all selling similar boxes of air. The best way to stand out is to give your customers the best experience… and for most customers, that means person-to-person.
The savviest operators know where AI can help and where a human touch is more important.
We’ll start by looking at what operators are already doing.
These are examples of ways real operators are finding success by using AI in self storage today. From security to communicating with customers and many things in between, one thing remains true: These tools aren’t replacing the human touch.
They enhance it.
Ease of implementing:
Expected cost range:
Using AI to communicate with self storage customers is a tricky business. In self storage, one of the best ways to set yourself apart is through great service.
AI sounds good most of the time, but it can’t replace a human manager or operator. AI can’t bring a cold bottle of water out on a hot day, and it can’t forge a genuine connection with your customers.
But there are ways to use it effectively and without sacrificing what matters.
While using AI for emails or getting an AI chatbot is pretty straightforward, there’s a lot of nuance to AI phone agents in self storage.
There are two main areas of concern:
Quality of service with an AI phone agent is a real hot-button issue today. They’re almost indisputably better than the old IVRs (those phone-tree systems where you press buttons to navigate an audio menu).
The problem is that many companies have fully swapped to AI phone agents, and it’s impossible for users to get a human on the other end. In some cases, it doesn’t even say it’s an AI!
Customers are wising up to this and don’t like it.
Important: If you’re going to use an AI voice agent, make sure it announces that it’s an AI and that there’s an option to reach a human.
The second thing to know about these voice agents is that they can impact your rank on Google.
Google sometimes uses an AI agent to call businesses. Sometimes Google’s AI agent and the business’s AI voice agent have conflicts or misunderstandings, and this can lead to impacts on your Google Business Profile’s rank.
If you do plan to use an AI voice agent for your storage facility, make sure to train it to handle calls from Google’s own AI. Otherwise, you could jointhe 49% of businesses failing to properly respond to Google’s AI agent with pricing information and other details.
This is a small risk, but it’s worth understanding.
Ease of implementing: EASY
Expected cost range: $100-500/month per location
Reviews still matter, and responding to them is important.
It's always better to respond to a NEGATIVE review with a real, human-written response that addresses their concerns.
The secret, though, is that most people don't read the responses to positive reviews. Many operators have found that letting an AI reputation management tool handle the bulk of their review responses cuts down on their workload significantly.
Some tools in this arena include:
Ease of implementing: MODERATE
Expected cost range: FREE to $250/month
Human-written content performs better on your website. It has better appeal to leads, and it even performs better in search results according to a study by Graphite.io.
But there are plenty of opportunities for using AI for other content.
There are lots of marketing tactics that weren’t worth the effort before, but with AI, they could be.
AI tools can help create flyers, banners, or even Google Posts for your storage facility. Here are some examples of AI tools (or tools with AI features) that can help self storage operators make content:
For the vast majority of self storage operators, a blog is unnecessary. But if you do choose to craft a blog for your facility, it needs to be high-quality, local-specific content that is helpful and interesting.
AI can’t really check the boxes for this kind of content.
AI also generates answers based on what is already out there on the internet, which means your AI-generated blog will only have NEW value if you put it there!
Should you have a blog? Probably not. If you do have a blog? Don’t use AI to write your posts.
Ease of implementing: EASY
Expected cost range: Unfortunately, none of these services list their prices.
Optimizing your rates takes a lot of research and thought! This is one area for which AI is well-suited. Tools such as Prorize can crunch immense amounts of data and get higher revenue than most operators can get alone.
Revenue management has been automated for years now. Savvy operators understand how rate management works, but still use rate management software. This is how you should do it, too, if you use AI: learn how to manage your own rates so you understand the process, but use the AI to save yourself the time.
If you want to use AI to help manage your rates but aren’t ready to commit to paying for a revenue management platform, you can take a look at this article on revenue management and consider using an AI chatbot to help gather and parse the data you need to sort through.
Your storage facility’s security is an obvious place where AI can help.
Many companies make security upgrades that have AI features. A common one is cameras that can identify what they’re looking at, for example.
Implementing and using new security upgrades at your storage facility is easy. But they do come with a price tag.
Here are the routes you can take:
Ease of implementing: EASY
Expected cost range: $600 to $9,000 per Device, $200+ yearly subscription
Combining camera systems with AI lets your cameras essentially monitor themselves. You can get alerts about suspicious activity, detect persons of interest (such as blacklisted customers or past intruders), and even implement license plate recognition.
Some companies with great AI-integrated cameras include:
Verkada and Rhombus can integrate with your existing cameras or sell their own devices. Spot.ai specifically integrates your existing camera systems.
Knightscope is a little different. It’s a robotics company, and you’ll need to purchase their products to benefit.
Ease of implementing: EASY
Expected cost range: $85 to $200+/month plus hardware costs
Changing up your access control is usually a little more complicated than adding cameras to your property. SpiderDoor actually makes it easy by taking over your existing hardware, but other options usually require full replacements.
When it comes to AI, these systems usually use AI to synthesize access data or to support access control at your facility.
Here are some access control options with current or upcoming AI-related products to consider:
Ease of implementing: MODERATE-to-HARD
Expected cost range: $100+/month
AI is handy for keeping track of internal company knowledge on processes, laws, and other things it’s important for your managers to know.
And the larger your self storage business, the more useful AI becomes for internal knowledge bases. Having every manager at every facility able to reference the same information by conversationally asking an AI chatbot questions is about as easy as it gets.
So, there are two areas we’re talking about here:
Claude is a great example of an AI chatbot that can handle this part of your business. Then, you can create specialized projects trained using uploaded documents.
Whatever LLM you choose to use, make sure to opt out of your data being used to train the model. Claude’s Enterprise plan turns this off by default, but other plans and LLMs should have their own way to opt out.
Next, create detailed prompts and rules for those projects, and suddenly you’ve got your own personally-trained AI chatbot just for your self storage business!
You can even just upload your operations manual to it for the most basic use, allowing your managers to ask questions and Claude to answer based on your operations manual. It won’t even reference external information if you set it up correctly!
Ease of implementing: HARD
Expected cost range: $300+/month
Setting up an AI to track your own business’s metrics, market trends, and industry news is very possible.
However, it does take a bit of work and know-how. This is marked as “HARD” just because you need to be a bit of an AI pro already.
The possibilities of what you might track are nearly endless, and there are many tools that can help. Some of these tools may require you to understand the process of setting up MCPs (Model Context Protocols), which are a little beyond the average operator or marketing team.
Additionally, most of the cost comes from paying for API access and setting up the MCPs.
For this reason, we recommend that most independent operators not worry about this use case. Larger operators that play on regional or multi-regional levels might have greater use for this. These same larger operators will have easier access to experts who can set this up.
If you don’t want to or can’t invest in setting this up, you can get most of the same value from paying attention to news from your state association and the national Self Storage Association.
In the storage industry, all eyes turn to the REITs to see what innovations or new strategies might catch on.
While we’re lucky that small operators can find their own niches, the industry at large is often driven by the largest operators.
So how are they using and thinking about AI?
The quote above is from CubeSmart, and the statement is pretty simple. Right now, national operators aren’t seeing any meaningful leads coming from AI sources.
We can get some more nuance with this quote from ExtraSpace:
So, the REITs aren’t currently worried about AI discovery. But they are aware that customers may one day in the future start using AI to find storage.
If you’re worried about getting left behind, watch the REITs. You don’t need to worry until they are. And we can be sure they’ll be ready to pivot when that day comes.
So, where do the REITs use AI?
For many of the internal use cases we already detailed:
Extra Space even recently launched an AI chatbot as well as an AI-powered storage size finder.
If you just want a list of AI tools to look into, here you go!
Keep in mind that these aren’t all of the AI tools out there for storage, and not all of them are made specifically for self storage.
Blue names on the text list, marked with triple asterisks (***), are self storage industry-specific players.
Ultimately, there are two key concepts to take away from this:
There are many common ways the savviest operators are already starting to use AI to improve their business. Most of those tools improve their business by taking over the more tedious work to create more bandwidth for important things that only a human can do (like connecting with your customers).
If you want to get started on using AI to better run your business, here are three places we’d start:
Here are some of my other favorite posts to check out!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
