If you’re interested in renting an apartment in one of Equity Residential’s 300 properties, chances are you’ll soon be chatting with Ella to set up an apartment tour or answer questions about a lease.

But Ella isn’t human. It’s an AI assistant that answers the phones and responds to hundreds of emails around the clock. It’s still sending quick replies after all the humans have gone home, when most inquiries typically come in.

Ella is so helpful that some people don’t realize they’re talking to a bot.

“Customers were calling in asking for Ella and saying, ‘We just love her work ethic.’ They wanted to make sure she was going to get her commission,” says Kristin Hupfer, a senior vice president of customer experience at Equity Residential. The firm discloses that Ella is an AI chatbot the first time it communicates with a person through email, phone or text, Hupfer says.

Ella has been a gamechanger for the Chicago-based property manager, which owns buildings in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Back in 2018, the firm’s staff struggled to keep up with the influx of hundreds of requests from prospective tenants each week. That in turn meant losing customers to rivals and keeping units idle. Then in 2019, it started working with New York-based EliseAI, the developer of Ella. Now the bot handles 1.5 million texts, emails and phone calls every year, allowing Equity Residential to save $20 million........

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