The AI runway: Public Storage builds a unified foundation for CX transformation

A mission built on trust, evolving in a new era

Public Storage is a nationwide self-storage leader serving over two million customers across more than 4,000 facilities. The company’s mission is to provide secure, convenient, and reliable storage solutions that make its customers’ lives easier, while delivering long-term value and maintaining high standards in service and operations. Founded in 1972, continuous innovation has been the driving force behind its longstanding market leadership.

In recent years, Public Storage’s Care Center had grown from a small service center to a full-service operation, with a 200%+ increase in its agent population and expanded service and sales across multiple channels, including the industry's first end-to-end digital rental experience. At the same time, rising customer expectations and an enterprise-wide AI strategy created an opportunity for Public Storage to further evolve its CX model.

While existing systems had supported growth and service excellence in the past, it was clear that moving beyond incremental modernization toward a more rapid transformation effort would require a more unified CX AI platform. The company also needed to support AI as a core operational capability rather than just another layer of technology.

Under Kaluarachchi’s leadership, Public Storage's transformation was guided by three strategic priorities: continue leading through customer-first innovation, evolve and scale the customer care model to support future growth, and align customer care with the company's broader AI initiatives.

Choosing the right partner

Public Storage needed more than a technology vendor. It was looking for a strategic partner that could support its long-term business strategy. Rather than adding point solutions, the company wanted a platform that could connect customer journeys across every touchpoint, unify customer, operational, and workforce intelligence, and create the architecture needed to scale AI across the business. NiCE stood out because of its deep CX expertise, unified CX AI platform, customer-first vision, and shared innovation roadmap, leading Public Storage to build its future on CXone.

Phasing transformation with operational impact

Public Storage approached its transformation as a phased journey that kept customers at the center of its efforts while operating at scale. The process started with one of the most important building blocks for successful CX AI: trusted, connected knowledge.

Public Storage modernized knowledge management for both customers and agents, replacing static FAQs with an intelligent self-service portal that synchronizes information in real time. Customers, agents, and AI all work from the same knowledge source, improving consistency while reducing effort across every interaction.

The impact was immediate. Average monthly traffic to the knowledge portal increased by 31.8% from 2024 to 2025 and grew another 46.3% the following year as more customers successfully resolved questions through self-service.

From there, Public Storage unified interaction analytics, performance management, quality management, feedback management, and workforce management on CXone, creating a connected operational ecosystem with visibility across every customer interaction rather than a representative sample.

That visibility translated directly into action. Analytics identified recurring customer frustration around payment receipts, prompting customer care, IT, and marketing teams to redesign the experience. Supervisors gained a single performance dashboard that combined login time, contacts handled, handle time, quality scores, and other operational metrics in one place. Customer feedback also became part of a continuous improvement process, with low survey scores automatically triggering follow-up and coaching.

The operational improvements speak for themselves:

• 8% improvement in CSAT among new hires
• 20% reduction in hold time
• 16% increase in customer survey response rates
  
  

Bringing in AI with intention

Only after establishing a unified CX foundation did Public Storage bring in new AI capabilities. As Kaluarachchi noted, many organizations have spent the last several years trying to layer AI onto technology environments that were never designed to support it. Public Storage took a different approach, investing in the underlying platform first so AI could become embedded within everyday operations rather than bolted on afterward.

In its next phase, the company focused on introducing automated interaction summaries and generative AI search across its knowledge ecosystem, drawing on customer 360 data spanning enterprise operations and individual properties.

Today, interaction summaries capture the details of each conversation automatically, making customer context available across the organization the moment it is needed. And generative AI search gives customers faster, more intuitive access to the same trusted information agents relied on, without waiting on hold or searching through disconnected sources.

This strategy is already delivering measurable results. Generative AI search now answers customer questions with 85% accuracy, knowledge portal traffic has increased by 31%, and customer follow-up rates have improved by 3.2 percentage points.

Accelerating agentic AI

Looking forward, Public Storage is focused on integrating AI agents into the workforce alongside its human agents. The goal is to build agentic experiences that are available to customers anytime, offering proactive help before issues escalate.

That shift is also meant to change what their human agents spend their time on. By handling more of the routine volume, AI agents will free up the team to focus on more complex customer concerns and on the conversations most likely to drive revenue, while still delivering smarter, more personalized support as the operation continues to scale.

The next phase builds on what's already working rather than starting something new: giving AI agents access to the same enterprise knowledge that supports human agents today, equipping employees with real-time AI assistance during live interactions, and continuing to optimize the platform and underlying data as new AI capabilities are tested and rolled out.

The throughline across all of it is customer obsession. For Public Storage, success means consistent, personalized experiences that make it easy to do business, delivered through greater visibility into every interaction and, ultimately, translated into stronger revenue and customer satisfaction.

The real AI runway

Public Storage's journey holds important insights for organizations accelerating AI adoption. The greatest returns don't come from deploying disconnected point solutions. They come from starting with a clear business strategy, choosing the right partner, and building a foundation that allows AI to understand customers, connect workflows, and continuously improve every interaction.

Public Storage demonstrates that enterprise AI isn't a separate initiative. It's an organizational capability that centralizes and grows stronger when customer experience, operations, and AI strategy move forward together.

For enterprise leaders, the message is clear. Building a connected CX foundation today creates the context, intelligence, and agility needed to realize AI's full business value tomorrow.