Ray Butler

I design work.

My work is where decisions happen, where ownership breaks down, where AI is asked to participate, where trust has to be earned, where work changes hands, where pilots have to become production, where accountability gets fuzzy, where data meets decisions, where humans and agents collaborate, where the system has to hold.

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.

Toolbox

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 automatically when the work calls for it.

Research

Interview Analysis

Turns raw user-interview and research sessions into themes, pain points, and JTBD statements.

Bundlesclustering script · affinity-map template

Competitive Intelligence

Tracks competitor releases and UX patterns and rolls them into SWOT and trend views.

BundlesSWOT template · trend-dashboard scaffold

Persona Intelligence

Keeps personas current — updating them from new research and flagging behavior shifts.

Bundlespersona template · archetype generator

Strategy

Problem Framing

Reframes requests, surfaces root causes, and challenges assumptions into sharper problem statements.

Bundlesopportunity-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.

BundlesJTBD-map template · outcome-roadmap scaffold

Systems Mapping

Identifies actors, dependencies, and bottlenecks and models them as blueprints and system maps.

Bundlesservice-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 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

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

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.

Achievements

Online AI courses completed from MIT, Stanford, Wharton, IBM, and Google Cloud — 19 credentials in all.

View all achievements →

Let's work together.

If your system isn't keeping up with your AI, that's the layer I design.

Let's talk

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I design work.

Toolbox

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 automatically when the work calls for it.

Research

Interview Analysis

Turns raw user-interview and research sessions into themes, pain points, and JTBD statements.

Bundlesclustering script · affinity-map template

Competitive Intelligence

Tracks competitor releases and UX patterns and rolls them into SWOT and trend views.

BundlesSWOT template · trend-dashboard scaffold

Persona Intelligence

Keeps personas current — updating them from new research and flagging behavior shifts.

Bundlespersona template · archetype generator

Strategy

Problem Framing

Reframes requests, surfaces root causes, and challenges assumptions into sharper problem statements.

Bundlesopportunity-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.

BundlesJTBD-map template · outcome-roadmap scaffold

Systems Mapping

Identifies actors, dependencies, and bottlenecks and models them as blueprints and system maps.

Bundlesservice-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 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

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

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.