| PERG News: September 2025 |
I get it. You are sick of hearing about it. It all sounds overhyped and seems to set unrealistic expectations. People are concerned it will displace them in their job. The new technology feels alienating and is a bit incomprehensible and frustrating to read or hear about. Many people are focused on ethical issues like privacy and authorship and are anxious about potential misuse. And it is everywhere these days. Media is saturated with AI.
But the question in my mind was simply, what, if anything can current AI tools do that is better than what unassisted humans working at rental companies already do? Especially given how highly customized and personalized our industry is. Not much, I expected. My problem was a lack of imagination. So, I asked around. I took a straw poll, speaking with ten rental company owners about how they are using AI. While most responses were about as expected, there were some big surprises. One business president told me, “Companies that are not using AI should just know, you are going 30 miles per hour when your competitors who are using it are going 100.” That was an eye-opener. And his is a medium-sized company not in New York or LA.
The consensus from companies using AI tools is that AI tools do not replace employees, but they can supercharge their work. AI offers the promise of leveling the playing field for smaller businesses through better SEO integration, smarter marketing and strategies, and data-driven decisions. From my brief, unscientific, survey, I started seeing the tools in three categories: tools that automate tedious, time-consuming work; tools that drive search engine optimization (SEO) and sales leads; and tools that can provide meaningful insights from large or difficult data sets.
I started with the rental software companies. If you are going to incorporate some level of AI into rental workflow, that seems a logical place to start. Bo Srisamutngam at Rental Tracker told me, “The future of AI is exciting, but we are treading lightly.” Rental Tracker had started integrating AI into software by after sharing it with clients, they decided to approach it carefully. “Our main priority is to ensure client data remains fully contained and SOC compliant, without exposing sensitive information to external AI systems.” However, Rental Tracker does see places that AI could be a significant benefit to their clients. “Our vision is to build AI-powered support directly within our platform to handle tasks such as generating quotes, calculating ROI, creating projections, and managing sub-rentals amongst others. We also want AI to be a FAQ function for training and onboarding new users; to help reduce redundant support questions to our power users and us. This way, clients can benefit from AI-driven functionality while keeping all data secure within our program. It's still on our roadmap, but not a priority.”
Rental Works is similarly in the early stages of programming some AI functionality. Melissa Guzman, Director of Training and Implementation, related that they are currently focusing on three areas: a chatbot for support, which provides Q&A utilizing the support site; analysis off back-office data (for example, ask AI “How much revenue did I make in 2023 for this item?”; and possibly some automated functions. Automation is in the idea stage at the moment, the objective would be to be able to type, "Build an order for The Smith Center in Las Vegas for two Arri camera packages with a 25% discount.” To Mellissa, this seems far off. “For me personally, this requires so much oversight by the user (“no, not that camera, this one”) that it is not a high priority now.”
Some of the ways that rental companies are already using AI include AI-assisted content creation and social media management, customized chat-bots and customer engagement tools, and AI-driven tools aimed at search engine optimization (SEO). These kinds of tools are well established at this point. The vast majority of influencer and branded content is AI-assisted. HypeAuditor survey conducted in August 2024 found that 83% of Instagram influencers use AI tools for content creation—covering everything from image and video production to captions and planning.
Social media requires constant creating and supervision to monitor engagement. Content creation tools include Claud, Gemini, Bard, ChatGPT and others. They can create initial drafts of articles and posts and suggest better titles to return the best engagement. The user must fact-check and rewrite for quality and to infuse the copy with your brand’s unique voice.
Social media management tools like Canva, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, BuzzSumo have built-in AI assistance for a variety of tasks from removing unwanted objects from photo backgrounds, to generating icons and illustrations, to writing text and generating full slide decks (text, images, design, and animation) from prompts. A lot of people find AI tools a timesaver for brainstorming and drafting SEO-friendly, keyword-optimized posts quickly. These tools can generate click-worthy and properly formatted meta tags at scale and update existing posts with fresher keywords and improved readability. They provide AI-driven analytics to track engagement, suggest best times to post, identify influential followers, and perform competitor comparisons.
Moz Local is an example of a search engine management platform targeting local SEO. It leverages machine learning to optimize Google Mind business listings and push information to get your business listed in more places in your geographic area.
Some companies are now using AI tools extensively to create content according to their SEO optimization plan. SEO content called ghost pages or orphan pages is not outward facing. These are articles about products that live on the website and include all the technical terms and keywords that will direct the search engine. Noone wants outward-facing pages that are SEO filler stuffed with keywords, which are awkward and repetitive. It is easy to have an AI tool create SEO content from a variety of perspectives, like one article that’s technical, another on user benefits, and a third taking a sassy approach or tied to a political bent—casting a wider net to catch more user searches.
Some rental companies are exploring the value of chatbots to engage visitors on their website and across messaging apps at any hour. I know, Chatbots? Ugg. But this technology has come a long way as language models have gotten more nuanced over the past year. You can train chatbots to go beyond answering FAQs. It can answer questions about your inventory, your procedures, and feed potential customers the right information. It can gather helpful customer data like communication preferences and purchase history as well as name and contact information (if the user inputs true information).
One rental house principal explained that the chatbot can also tip you off to fraudsters. The PERG member noted that people will ask blunt questions when they think they are conversing with a machine. Reading the chat transcripts, rental management can easily identify questions by person looking to steal the equipment. One person even asked, “Where is the equipment stored, and which is the closest exit.” When a customer wants to know if the rental company has an FX-6 and zoom lenses—which is a red flag all by itself—the chatbot is trained to use an escape hatch, like, “I am not qualified to answer that question. Please contact an account rep and speak in person.” But the account rep never hears from them.
Beyond the AI applications PERG members told me about, there are other tools that may or may not be helpful to a rental company depending on their market. For example, competitor tracking tools mine data sources on key competitors in your space, looking at their pricing, campaigns, search approaches, SEO tactics, top performing keywords, backlinks, social visibility, and paid ad history. These are part of AI-driven marketing suites like SemRush and SpyFu, available as a monthly subscription. They provide information that only AI can efficiently collate.
For data analysis, ChatGBT can perform tasks like summarizing data from a spreadsheet or answering your specific questions based on numerical data you feed it. Upload IT data about your website traffic and quickly get answers to specific questions about visitor behavior.
What is less clear is if rental companies can reliably and (relatively) easily use AI to gain insights from financial data or utilization data about equipment. For example, would it be a cost-effective way to drill down into financial data and get a truly accurate picture of ROI and the ability to better determine when a product should be retired or sold? AI can assess financial data from any structured source — Excel sheets, databases, accounting software. But the data for most businesses is split between separate software for accounting, rental orders, and possibly a customer relationship management (CRM) system. So, integrating those data sources is a tall order. Nevertheless, other equipment rental industries (outside entertainment) have started using AI for dynamic pricing and demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, personalized recommendations, and customer service.
What about the privacy of your data? For general users, your inputs may be stored and potentially used to improve the AI model—unless you're using privacy-focused versions like ChatGPT Enterprise or Team, which offer stricter data handling. Enterprise plans (e.g., ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu, API) offer stronger safeguards such as: AES-256 encryption for stored data and TLS 1.2+ for transit encryption, SOC 2 compliance and third-party audits, data residency policies, and zero-data-retention options. OpenAI is exploring end-to-end encryption for temporary chats to enhance privacy, though this feature is still under consideration (as of August 2025).
Another area, which is going to be more controversial, is assessing legal documents like rental contracts and redlining. There are specialized legal AI contract review tools intended for legal professionals, but they not for businesses. However, some rental companies have started looking into using general-purpose AI tools. For example, OpenAI fine-tuned GPT models that you train with pairs of contract snippets and risk classification based on your rules. You can add prompt templates like “Identify any clauses violating our risk profile in payment terms or forum selection clause (jurisdiction clause).” You’d define your risk playbook, listing clauses to watch for. You’d annotate past contracts highlighting compliant vs. non-compliant language. You’d need to test and iterate by running unseen contracts through the model and refine based on false positives/negatives. And then integrate it into your contract review workflow. But implementation of this process appears to be theoretical at this point.
Rental companies also told me, once you are aware of the impact of AI, you start to see how profoundly it is already affecting day to day. For example, employee applicant resumes are often AI generated. There is a trend on all social media platforms of increasingly AI-generated content.
When you start diving into it, the abundance and diverse selection of AI tools on the market is a bit overwhelming. People who are exploring this area, start with a small commitment in one area where they sense that leading the competition can gain them an advantage and yield outsized returns in the long term.
AI raises many questions about this brave new world, which we have not even touched on here. But the companies that have found ways to adopt AI tools say, whether you feel it is for you, your competitors have probably already started using it.
.png)
