Ray Butler
What I actually deliver.
- Human–agent interactions that earn trust through behavior.
- RAG systems on the thin slices of real data you actually have.
- AI risk + ROI reads before the spend, so decisions sit on evidence.
- Agentic POCs — working prototypes in days, ready to pressure-test.
- Shipped AI use cases that move real customer outcomes.
Selected works
Toolbox
The craft, and the agents that extend it.
Human Skills
- AI Systems Architecture
- Experience Design
- Service Design
- Customer Research
- Product Strategy
- Conversation Design
- AI Governance
- Human-in-the-Loop Design
- Decision Architecture
- Object-Oriented UI
- Agentic coding
- Multi-Agent Systems
- Agent-Oriented Workflows
Agent Skills
Modular capabilities I build for Claude. Each packages instructions, metadata and optional resources (scripts, templates) the model loads when the work calls for it.
Research
Interview Analysis
Turns raw user-interview and research sessions into themes, pain points, and JTBD statements.Bundles clustering script · affinity-map template
Competitive Intelligence
Tracks competitor releases and UX patterns and rolls them into SWOT and trend views.Bundles SWOT template · trend-dashboard scaffold
Persona Intelligence
Keeps personas current — updating them from new research and flagging behavior shifts.Bundles persona template · archetype generator
Strategy
Problem Framing
Reframes requests, surfaces root causes, and challenges assumptions into sharper problem statements.Bundles opportunity-brief template · challenge-framing prompt
Jobs-To-Be-Done
Extracts jobs and forces of progress and maps them to the outcomes people are reaching for.Bundles JTBD-map template · outcome-roadmap scaffold
Systems Mapping
Identifies actors, dependencies, and bottlenecks and models them as blueprints and system maps.Bundles service-blueprint template · system-map scaffold
Micro Apps
Small apps I build to work with my agents faster: capture input, brief them, monitor runs and review what they produce.
Agent Console
One place to brief any agent in plain language and get structured results back.
Capture Inbox
Drop in notes, transcripts, or links and route them to the right agent automatically.
Run Dashboard
Watch active agent runs, their status, and cost at a glance.
Review Queue
Approve, edit, or reject agent outputs without leaving the flow.
Selected Work
Selected AI systems
Low Ox Life
Consumer iOS app — live in the App Store
Shipped- Designed, built, and shipped to the App Store end-to-end — free, with in-app upgrades.
- Free Harvard 2023 Oxalate Table; paid tier adds food logging, journal history, and cloud sync.
bfl.design
AI-native portfolio + agency site — live in production
Live- Designed, built, and shipped end-to-end — including Buddy, an embedded AI chat assistant that captures and qualifies leads in conversation.
- Agent-first admin where Gemini triages each lead on demand — score, temperature, fit, and draft outreach — backed by a full audit trail.
PlanFlow
AI permit-intake completeness system — Independent
Active Development- Built an AI completeness gate that decides whether a permit submission is review-ready — intake triage, not code compliance.
- RAG agents read a curated jurisdiction checklist (27 canonical items + conditional triggers) to flag missing or invalid documents with confidence and evaluation scoring.
Experience
Where the craft was built.
Jan 2025 – Present
Dallas, TX
Founder & AI Systems Architect
Big Freight Life
- A design-led AI Systems Architecture practice — I design and build the systems around AI for teams putting it into real operations.
- The human and agentic workflows, the data, and the decisions, and how they fit together. AI-native, end to end, proven on real data.
Jun 2020 – Jan 2025
Dallas, TX
Design Consultant
Big Freight Life
- Experience and product design across web and digital products: researching the real job a product is hired to do, and modeling the system behind the screen.
- Objects first, systems before surfaces, the human in the loop. When generative AI arrived, I pointed all of it at the system around the AI.
Apr 2022 – Apr 2026
Cleveland, OH · Remote
Experience Designer
Hyland Software
- Led experience design for the systems and integrations that move work through large organizations — starting upstream with discovery and customer research.
- Designed across Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and Esri, focused on workflow orchestration: how data, decisions, and people hand off across connected platforms.
- Regulated, high-stakes work — secure submission systems and compliance-constrained platforms — defining system behavior, accessibility, and the decision flows complex workflows depend on.
Apr 2012 – Jan 2019
Houston, TX
Visual Designer / Copywriter / Owner
BUCO Freight Lines, LLC
- Owned and operated a small trucking company, wearing every hat — Safety Director (regulatory compliance and driver safety) and daily operations.
- Designed everything the business needed: WordPress sites, an online contractor application portal, driver mobile apps, social content, and print CDL driver manuals.
The training
and the shelf.
Online AI courses from MIT, Stanford, Wharton, IBM and Google Cloud: 19 credentials in all.
You’re not missing AI. You’re missing the system behind it.
When the model is capable but the work still feels unclear, fragile or ungoverned, that's the layer I design.