Austin was a good one. The rooms were full, the energy was high, and we got real time with customers and friends we usually only see on a screen. Keep scrolling for some photos from the event.

The moment I’ll remember most happened at someone else’s booth. Trusted Self Storage Professionals had their Uniti AI agent Jane front and center in how they pitch their management business. Their sign said it plainly: “AI-powered support. Real people behind it.”

People across the whole Trusted team, from district managers to facility managers, knew Jane by name, and more than a few told us how much they love working with her. When an operator decides their AI agent is something worth leading with, that tells you where this industry is headed.

The floor is catching up to the stage

In the general session, leaders from StorageMart, Extra Space and SmartStop told the room to embrace AI vendors. They called “people will always want a real person” outdated thinking. StorageMart is now requiring AI use for several hundred of its non-store employees.

On the expo floor, most operators we talked to had started with AI on the simpler stuff, like answering service calls. Now they want to know what’s next. Can it handle a move-out? Schedule a repair? Follow up on a web lead the minute it lands? And can I see exactly what it’s doing for the business, week over week?

Those questions come from operators getting ready to go further, and they’re paying close attention to quality. One operator told us they’d moved on from an agent that wasn’t getting answers right and are now looking for one that does. Accuracy is quickly becoming the thing that separates one agent from another.

AI is already at work behind the scenes

Plenty of operators are already using AI every day inside their business. The AI and remote management roundtables were packed, and there was a full session on using Claude and ChatGPT for reporting, rate gap analysis and writing policy docs.

That hands-on experience is changing how operators shop. When you’ve spent a few months building your own reports with these tools, you know what good looks like, and you expect any AI vendor to show you real results.

Everyone’s talking about rate increases

Existing customer rate increases (ECRIs) came up in almost every session. The revenue management panel spent most of its hour on communication: helping managers explain the why, writing better letters, and reaching tenants who never open the mail or the email. In the marketing session, “when will my rate increase?” came up as one of the questions tenants ask all the time and almost nobody answers online.

It’s a communication problem more than a pricing one. A tenant who understands the increase is a lot easier to keep than one who finds out from a letter they didn’t read.

Thanks to TSSA for a great show, and to everyone who stopped by, grabbed us in a hallway, or sat through a breakout with us.