he age of artificial intelligence poses a persistent question: Can you believe what you see or hear online?
Whatever good already comes from AI and may promise to come, the risks of being fooled by it are growing. The technology, while often detectable in videos and audio, is getting better at tricking the eye and the ear.
Of course, fakery itself is nothing new. It certainly showed up in the analog world. Touched-up photos, embellished descriptions, and misleading offers are among the misdeeds, says Cris Burnam, CEO of StorageMart, a privately owned self-storage company with facilities in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. It’s based in Columbia, Mo., owns 375 self-storage facilities, and has about $600 million in annual revenue.
“The human mind is infinitely resourceful, and sometimes devious, so I suppose it could happen [in self-storage],” Burnam says. “It’s such early times, though, that I think operators are still trying to figure out how to even show up in AEO [answer engine optimization]. So, that’s where I think the majority of the focus is, versus figuring out how to cheat.”
Marketing, analytics, and customer-experience optimization company CXL (cxl.com/about) defines AEO as “the practice of optimizing your content so that search platforms can directly provide answers to user queries, rather than just listing links. It focuses on making your content the answer that engines deliver to users, whether through featured snippets, voice assistant responses, or AI-powered chat results. While traditional SEO aims to improve website ranking and visibility on search engine results pages, AEO goes a step further by positioning content as the definitive answer to specific questions.”
Burnam gives this example of the need to learn how to use AEO to your business’ advantage: When you do an internet search for self-storage, there used to be “maps” that would show up prominently in Google. Now they’re pushed down in the search results and being replaced higher up, with an AI answer often as the top result.
“Businesses of all flavors, not just self-storage, are figuring out what to do about that,” says Burnam. “Maps listings used to be free. They’re still largely free, but not showing up as much, so you’re seeing your search volume really diminish from those traditional SEO sources.”
Having to pay more to Google for search results is happening more as well. Something related to the question of whether online trust in self-storage is eroding Burnam said is: “Would somebody use AI to make their facility look better online than it really does?” Before AI, maybe a facility photo was taken on a cloudy day, for example.
But he gives another example: Someone in the hotel business takes an exterior photo of a property and wants it to look like the Four Seasons, even though it looks more like a Ramanda Inn. The person uses AI to spiff it up Four Seasons-style. “I think that’s probably dishonest,” says Burnam. “And I can see where it could happen.”
The self-storage industry has historically policed itself well as “a group of hardworking entrepreneurs who have subscribed to ethical business practices,” Burnam says, “but it’s a brave new world,” and these kinds of dishonest practices could be happening.
Self-storage has been a “simple business in terms of the social contract between you give me some money and I give you a decent place to put your storage,” Burnam adds. “And because it’s used for storage, it’s a little different than, ‘Wow, I checked into my hotel room and I’m right next to the dumpster and you didn’t tell me about it.’ Or you use a wide-angle lens to take a picture of my kitchen in the apartment I’m going to rent. And in fact, I get there and it’s a lot smaller than it looked on the photo. Those are the kinds of things that I think you see in storage-adjacent real estate businesses [adjacent by type, including apartments, moving services, and anything rented for a short term].”
“No, you really can’t do that, because everybody has sophisticated revenue-management programs now,” Burnam says. “And they figure that the guy who just pops in the door and shows up is willing to pay a little more than the person who’s online and shopping really hard.”
StorageMart stores use AI for as much as 30 percent of their customer call volume, per Burnam, “so using a non-human to answer these calls is much more efficient than using call center staff or on-site staff, especially at large busy stores.”
It’s “the easiest payback on AI that we have seen,” Burnam says. It includes basic calls, such as when rent is due, the office hours, and forgotten gate codes. These calls can be handled using AI agents and large language models (LLMs). This creates better service.
AI is also used in revenue management to decide when and how much to increase rents, and it’s being used to make better advertising decisions. These two topics are as much business intelligence (BI) as AI.
“The lines begin to merge and get fuzzy as one is essential to the other,” says Burnam.
Driving by the facility and seeing it that way firsthand before seeking it online “would in fact make the deepfake, AI-generated, or misleading advertisements more difficult to carry off,” he says. Roughly 2 percent to 10 percent of StorageMart’s customers, depending on the facility, come from long distance without having seen the facility, but the majority are from the local markets the company serves.
“A really lousy location” at the back of an industrial park, for example, that people wouldn’t drive by, could be “a fabulous physical property” with “all the bells and whistles, but it never does as well as the one that’s located out at First and Main,” Burnam says. “I’ve been in this business since 1987; the one thing that has always been true is that if you have a great location, you’re going to do well. And that’s whether it was back in the Yellow Pages days, in the early days of the internet, and now here we are in the dawning era of artificial intelligence.”
Charbonneau feels that any erosion of trust has more to do with aggressive rent increases that customers don’t understand than AI, but trust could be damaged if companies use AI systems for customer service and don’t tell customers up front that it’s AI.
Charbonneau stressed that having a live person back up AI customer interactions “is paramount, because while AI is absolutely fabulous, and I can’t stress that enough, for the day to day, you know, we take millions of calls, and we know how many of those are going to be—I need to check my balance, I want to know why it’s $5 more this month than it was last month, I need my gate code—all of those kinds of questions that AI is so well suited for, but the moment they need something that the AI can’t handle, I want them to be able to have a live person who can think and act and make decisions accordingly,” she says. “So, I think that’s where the trust factor comes in is that they’re getting what they need and they’re getting it quickly.”
AleX gives quotes, but it then transfers callers to a live agent to create a lease, which the company considers a lead, according to Charbonneau. Some AI companies use only AI from start to finish. “We have 26 years of call data to draw from to teach our system how to act,” she says.
The company created and maintains its AI system in-house to keep all its tenants’ information private by not sharing it with a third party. Clients can listen to calls and see transcripts of their AI conversations. This can help customers understand AI’s value to them.
People working in self-storage have been going to trade shows, reading articles, and attending webinars for the past several years telling them why AI is so valuable for serving their customers, says Charbonneau, but their tenants haven’t. Therefore, service providers must “do the absolute level best you can with the service that’s out there” to demonstrate the value to their customers.
According to Charbonneau, some customers have said they were surprised at how much the company’s AI system knew about them and thought it was “a little weird,” but as long as the AI system is being fed and then uses accurate information and a live agent is standing by to confirm it, customers will be satisfied with the service. She thinks the need for a live agent as backup will decrease as AI becomes the norm.
Scott Levy, president and CIO of Highline Storage Partners, a retail owner-operator of about 60 self-storage assets in the Southeast, based in Birmingham, Ala., has seen no erosion of trust caused by AI. He thinks a majority of Highline’s customers aren’t using AI to find its stores—yet.
Highline uses live agents for direct, incoming sales calls. It uses AI for rollover and first-level service calls “to help us help the customer self-serve their problem.” For example, if a customer can’t find his gate code, or wants to pay his rent, they’ll talk to an AI agent instead of a live agent.
Despite this doubt about what you see or hear, “it has nothing to do with self-storage,” Watkins says. “In fact, self-storage is isolated substantially from the AI revolution because the industry is so slow to adapt and so not tech-forward that they’re going to be the last to the table. Now, does that really matter? Because if you don’t believe anything you hear or see, does it matter whether it’s AI or not? Is AI building mistrust in other areas?”
AI could improve trust in customer service, says Watkins. For example, he recently called to make a reservation at a restaurant he knew well. He encountered an AI agent. Because he’s building and investing in AI—Tenant uses an in-house AI system for some of its customer service—he tried to “break” the restaurant’s AI agent by asking questions it couldn’t answer or making reservation changes it couldn’t handle. He was unsuccessful.
To him, this experience illustrates that now “is the most fascinating time that business has ever seen in the history of business with the tools and functions that AI is bringing to market.”
Watkins goes on to say, “And what it can do today has nothing to do with what it can do tomorrow. And I do mean tomorrow; I don’t mean next week, next month, next year. The evolution of this product is moving so fast. And in many ways, it’s moving in ways that will wind up great for the storage industry because we have a very simple business. People pick an empty room to put stuff in. Maybe they visit it; maybe they don’t. They come through a gate. They make some payments … It’s dirt simple.”
He pointed to five “pillars of running a storage facility.” They are gate-access control, taking payments, revenue management, moving tenants in and out, and doing leases.
“That is not AI,” says Watkins. “AI agents serving your customers are adapting by the second, on their own.”
Ultimately, AI can erode or strengthen trust, depending on how it’s used.
“Use AI appropriately and you will build trust,” he says. “You’ll take away the friction in customer service.”