The self-storage industry’s most prominent FMS platforms recently gathered for a candid conversation about where facility management software is headed and what AI actually means for operators. The panel, hosted by SBOA, brought together leaders from QuikStor, Cubby, Storable, and Monument for one of the most-registered webinars for the organization to date. The interest alone says something about where the industry’s head is at.
The conversation covered a lot of ground. But a few themes kept surfacing and QuikStor’s Chief Innovation Officer Andrew Hadzi-Pavlovic was direct about where he stands on each of them.
Every panelist agreed that AI is changing how FMS platforms are built and how operators run their businesses. Where the conversation got more nuanced was around how AI should actually work in practice.
Andre was clear: the value of AI isn’t removing the operator from the equation. It’s in giving them better tools to make decisions.
“Most revenue management approaches are a black box,” he said. “Feed data in, get a number out. That’s truly not the case for how this should work.” His example landed: a facility with a row of above-unit lockers that have never been rentable will look like a low-occupancy site to a model that doesn’t know better. A black box has no way to account for that. An operator working alongside AI, bringing that facility-level context, can.
Andrew Capranos, President of Self-Storage at Cubby, echoed the sentiment, calling AI “the great equalizer” for independent operators. But he drew the same distinction Andre did: there is a difference between bolting AI onto a platform and actually building a software around it.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. Andre made a point that gets to the heart of QuikStor’s rebuild: modern AI development has given engineering teams three to five times the output velocity they had before. But that speed only translates into value for operators if the platform underneath was built to support it.
A lot of solutions out there are really dated, monolithic architectures,” Andre said. “Architectures that can’t support the speed and pace at which AI is helping us develop today. Architecture’s not a feature. It’s really building from the ground up.
QuikStor spent the last five years doing exactly that, rebuilding the platform from scratch with modern architecture, open APIs, and the flexibility to let operators choose their own path, whether that means using QuikStor’s native capabilities, an external AI tool they have already built, or a third-party partner they trust.
Director of Business Development at Monument James Elkins and KJ Anand, CPO at Storable, both reinforced the openness point, with James noting that API openness is one of the biggest differentiators in how operators can run multi-site businesses efficiently.
When the panel was asked where FMS platforms would be in three to five years, the answers were thoughtful. Andrew from Cubby said operators will stop asking what the software tracks and start asking what it did for them overnight. KJ talked about agents becoming first-class citizens on these platforms alongside humans.
Andre framed it differently: “I truly feel the FMS will be the system of record,” he said. “And everything around it is just going to get better.”
His point was that the seasonality of the industry, the push and the pull between all-in-one solutions and best-in-class solutions, will continue. But the system of record always remains central to how operators run their business. What changes is how intelligent, open, and fast it becomes.
For operators, the implication is straightforward: the platform you’re running today will either keep up with that evolution or it won’t. The difference will show up in how quickly your team can act, how much manual work gets eliminated, and whether the AI your software promises is actually working with your data or just generating noise.
The best operators aren’t waiting around to figure this out. They’re capturing every lead regardless of channel, automating follow-up before anything slips through, and using their data to make pricing decisions with intention.
The FMS is the foundation all of that runs on. And as Andre put it, the question isn’t whether AI is coming to self-storage. It’s already here. The question is whether the platform underneath your operation is built to support where it’s at now and where it’s headed.