Ten months in, Boardwalk Storage's AI agent Ava has changed how the company runs collections, and how much of it a human ever needs to touch.

• Boardwalk Storage saw the number of delinquent tenants needing outreach fall 36%
  
  

• The share of tenants still delinquent a month after first contact dropped from 58% to 48%.
  
  

• Ava now handles more than 8,300 conversations across voice, email, SMS, and web chat in her first 10 months live, including roughly 2,250 focused specifically on collections.
  
  

• Of the roughly 1,800 collections conversations Ava generates in a typical month, only a small fraction ever need to be handed to a property manager.

  
  

Boardwalk Storage is a top-50 self storage operator offering climate-controlled storage, drive-up units, traditional storage, and RV, boat, trailer, and vehicle storage at locations across Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky.

The gap: a manual process, and a call that couldn't go unanswered

Before Ava, collections at Boardwalk ran the way it does at a lot of storage operators: manually, and dependent on whichever property manager happened to be handling a given site that week. Some were simply better at it than others. And the busiest weeks of the month, when guests themselves called in to pay, were also the weeks property managers had the least time left over to chase down the accounts that hadn't.

For Doug Steverson, CEO of Boardwalk Storage, the standard he cared about most was simpler than any one workflow: no call should go unanswered. "It drives me crazy to think that when someone calls a facility, they don't get somebody," he said. Even a third-party call center, he'd found, still let a meaningful share of calls fall through the cracks.

Evaluating vendors, and choosing Uniti

Doug looked at more than one AI vendor before deciding, narrowing the field down to two finalists. The decision ultimately came down to Uniti's track record specifically in self storage, its existing integration with SiteLink, the platform Boardwalk already ran on, and confidence in the team behind it. 

Rather than treat every operator the same way a generic AI tool might, Uniti's experience in the industry gave Doug more confidence the agent would actually hold up on the ground. He says the modest cost difference between vendors made the choice clear: pick the partner best suited to the job, not just the cheapest option.

Starting small: the Bowling Green pilot

Boardwalk didn't roll Ava out everywhere at once. The first deployment was a single, high-volume facility in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a community known for long, personal conversations at the counter as much as quick transactions. Doug spent time at the property himself to understand exactly what property managers there were dealing with before Ava ever took a call.

That first site became a real learning period for both teams. Boardwalk worked closely with Uniti to train Ava on the specifics of the property and refine how she handled the kinds of questions and conversations unique to that community. Along the way, Boardwalk also worked out where a human voice should come first and where Ava was better suited to step in. 

The company landed on a deliberate structure: property managers remain the first point of contact whenever they're available, with Ava providing coverage after hours, during overflow, or whenever staff are already occupied elsewhere. That balance, people first, AI in support, has stuck as Boardwalk has expanded Ava to more locations since.

The solution: scaling from 7 facilities to 14

With that foundation in place, Boardwalk expanded Ava to seven of its self-managed facilities in early 2026. Following a portfolio acquisition later that year, the company brought her to all fourteen properties it now operates, live across voice, Ava's primary channel and the one Doug considers most important, along with email, SMS, and web chat.

The results: a call that changed how Boardwalk saw Ava

Dixie Zuger, Boardwalk's SVP of Operations, was skeptical of Ava early on, and Doug knew her buy-in mattered more than anyone else's on the team. "I need your buy-in," he told her, "because if you don't buy in, the property managers aren't going to buy in."

Then collections went live. Ava placed hundreds of outbound calls in a matter of minutes, reaching accounts that had gone quiet for months, some already headed toward auction. The next day, the team reviewed how much past-due balance had actually come in. Dixie called Doug directly. "Did you see this?" she said. "This is amazing. We never had a day like this with collecting past dues."

Some of the accounts Ava reached hadn't answered a call from Boardwalk in a long time. "As far as we knew they were dead," Doug said. "We couldn't get anybody in their family tree to answer the phone, and now they've answered the phone and are paying."

That day changed Dixie's view of the rollout, and once she was on board, the rest of the property managers followed. In the months since, Boardwalk has seen delinquent tenants needing outreach fall by more than a third, and the share of tenants who stay delinquent a month later drop from 58% to 48%.

Doug is careful about how he frames what Ava replaces. "Our very best property managers at collections, Ava's not as good as," he said. "Our worst property manager at collections, Ava's better than." What she offers instead is consistency: she works the schedule she's set to run, regardless of whatever else is happening at a property that day.

Doug's advice to other operators

Asked what he'd tell a fellow operator who hasn't looked into AI agents yet, Doug didn't hesitate: "If you're not at least looking at it, you're a fool. It's coming, and if you don't, somebody else is going to eat your lunch."