everaging AI helps Stuf Storage manage a nationwide self-storage portfolio with a tiny team. Founded in 2020, the startup partners with real estate owners to turn underutilized spaces into remotely operated storage locations.
Tapping AI in areas such as video surveillance and pricing and revenue management has been critical to Stuf’s success in building a portfolio of 31 locations across seven cities with just three full-time operations staff. The company plans to continue scaling its business with the assistance of a purpose-built AI agent, dubbed Sidney, which it launched in 2025 to manage routine customer interactions.
Stuf notes that Sidney’s augmenting of its member experience team, which includes taking inbound calls as well as making outbound calls and sending outbound texts, has driven a 17 percent increase in sales conversions. “It really is a good extra set of hands,” says Katharine Lau, Stuf Storage co-founder and CEO.
Stuf is one of many self-storage operators harnessing advanced AI to help rent units and manage customers. Three years after the release of ChatGPT, generative AI (the kind of AI that can spin up content such as text and images on command) has begun to improve efficiency and support decision-making throughout the industry.
Storage operators and vendors have found promising use cases for AI in areas such as marketing, customer service, and pricing. The most visible impact has been at the top of the sales funnel, where leads are nurtured and the customer journey begins.
During an online meetup in August 2025, Jim Ross, founder of self-storage management company 3 Mile Storage Management, demonstrated how platforms such as ChatGPT and Lovable can be used to conduct competitor analysis, role play customer interactions, and create marketing content from scratch.
Ross showed how a user can prompt ChatGPT to generate detailed profiles of the five to seven top competitors within a three- to five-mile radius of a specific storage facility in Tennessee. For each competitor, he asked for a company overview, a summary of reviews on the facility’s Google Business Profile, key features and amenities, target keywords on the website, and ownership information and history.
The platform took just over five minutes to provide a detailed analysis. Ross told Messenger he finds AI useful for generating marketing images and videos for storage owners, as well as competitor analysis that can inform decision-making about pricing and marketing. “In the past, you’ve had to pay for those kinds of services,” says Ross. “It’s still kind of bare bones, but at least it gives you something to work with that’s free.”
This helps level the playing field for operators who don’t have the budgets to develop their own internal tools. “It gives the small operator the tools to kind of compete against the big boys,” Ross adds.
Powered by advanced large language models (LLMs), Uniti AI provides conversational support and persistent follow-up across a variety of channels: voice calls, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web chat. The partnership with OpenTech aims to automate routine customer inquiries while smoothly escalating more complex cases to live human operators.
“You still get the benefit of a 24/7 human backup, but it’ll be at a lower cost than if you had that alone,” says Francesco Decamilli, Uniti AI’s co-founder and CEO.
Routine conversations that can be easily automated account for up to 80 percent of communication; these would be, for example, calls about rental rates, move-in and move-out policies, gate code requests, and outstanding payments. The other 20 percent are more complex situations that require a human touch, such as when customers have a billing dispute or need to report damage to their units or an emergency.
“It’s a fully native AI backend, which is a differentiator for us relative to some legacy industry platforms that have more traditional chatbot infrastructure with decision trees and so on,” he says, noting that the partnership with OpenTech allows Uniti to market the combined voice agent plus call center solution to potentially hundreds of thousands of self-storage facilities worldwide.
Another company innovating in this space is self-storage tech firm Storable, which launched an AI-powered digital assistant called Agent Assist in July 2025. Storable told Messenger that more than 60 percent of Agent Assist interactions are happening after hours when facilities are closed, yet the tool still resolves 90 percent of tenant requests.
“Operators are willing to adopt AI where there’s clear ROI, and with Agent Assist we’re already seeing that in the form of new revenue and cost savings,” says Taylor Yarbrough, Storable’s vice president of product.
For companies that develop their own AI solutions, the data-crunching required to build a helpful chatbot can yield far-reaching benefits. Stuf Storage’s AI agent, Sidney, was trained on 60,000 hours of customer calls and millions of interactions and data points.
Sidney handles routine customer inquiries and sales, supplementing the capabilities of the company’s proprietary self-storage management software, StufOS, which also incorporates AI. Intensive training allowed Stuf to “mold” Sidney into a personality that can effectively connect with users and drive bookings, according to Lau.
Sidney also has a built-in AI model that analyzes calls and extracts recommendations to support the company’s decision-making via an insights dashboard. A jump in customer mentions of price matching from one week to the next, for example, might be a sign that it’s time for Stuf to compare its rates against competitors.
“If there are a lot of questions about sizing for this particular location, you might want to improve how you talk about sizing here,” says Lau. “Sometimes we’re so focused on one thing, let’s say this month it’s all about customer rate increases, but maybe we’re not thinking about the list prices, or we’re not thinking about new supply coming online.”
“We develop a lot of our own software to either automate or augment the workflows that go into running a self-storage facility,” says Peter Smyth, CEO and co-founder of White Label Storage, a third-party self-storage management company with over 200 managed facilities in its portfolio. “Pretty much every single one of these tools has some piece of AI embedded in the software.”
“We use LLMs to help process rate management with our revenue management tool. We use it to audit code across all of our products, and we use it to assist in strategy recommendations at the asset level. For example, this tool uses AI to collect data on a submarket level that informs what a competitive rate looks like within that area,” Smyth adds.
Another company that uses AI to inform pricing decisions is SmartStop Self Storage REIT, a listed REIT that owns or manages 236 properties in the U.S. and Canada. SmartStop’s proprietary AI pricing agents enable millions of automated pricing adjustments each month.
“AI is a key part of our operating platform and a critical component of our broader innovation strategy,” H. Michael Schwartz, SmartStop chairman and CEO, said in a statement. He added that the company’s pricing system delivers “meaningful performance improvements across the portfolio.”
Without using LLMs, the company’s automation platform enables operators to slash their over-90-day past-due accounts by up to 95 percent and reduce their outstanding debt by 50 percent within one year of implementation.
“We not only reduce the overall delinquency dollars that are outstanding, but our automation accelerates the process and empties out those units quicker, so they go back into circulation,” says Shardlow.
For example, Ai Lean maintains attorneys alongside its tech platform to advise on tricky legal situations like abandoned vehicles. Shardlow also noted that artificial intelligence shouldn’t replace human judgment when it comes to tenant relationships or strategic business decisions.
People are in the driver’s seat for all decisions at White Label, but using AI in the company’s pricing strategy enables smarter and more informed decisions for clients, according to Smyth.
“Operators need to remember that AI is not at the place where you can set it and forget it,” he says. “You need people to execute and provide sanity checks on whatever AI produces.”