Butler Plus scales operations with agentic orchestration on OutSystems

When form-based systems can’t keep up with business growth

Butler Plus is a fast growing valet and doorstep trash service provider based in Tampa, Florida. With 1,300 employees, the company runs a nationwide operation supporting more than 350,000 residents across 34 states. 

That growth, however, exposed the limits of their existing technology.

“As we grew, our systems became more complex, and we needed a way to scale faster and improve our insights to better serve our communities,” explained Ricky Rodriguez, Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems.

Built using traditional custom development, their legacy solution required employees to navigate many clicks just to complete their nightly tasks. This included uploading thousands of images every night that the back-office teams had to manually review to check for uniform compliance and proper area clearance.

That review process took 24 to 48 hours, leaving the team perpetually reactive and playing catch up to customer complaints and cancellations. It also made expanding into new service lines increasingly difficult.

"We wanted to implement AI throughout our processes. That comes with security requirements and guardrails to make sure that we’re maintaining the right level of privacy for our clients while still moving quickly. OutSystems ticked all the boxes. It was a no-brainer."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

Choosing a platform approach to enable scale

Ricky and the business ops team knew they had to rethink their approach from the ground up. “We didn’t want to just build an app; we wanted to build a new operating system within our tools that would enable us to expand and run our service offerings under one cohesive tech stack,” said Ricky. 

The team evaluated several off-the-shelf solutions, but none could meet Butler Plus’ requirements without compromise. “We needed live, onsite evidence capture, highly specific frontline workflows, rapid iteration, and an AI-ready architecture, all while scaling to thousands of users without per-user pricing that grows faster than the business,” shared Ricky. 

A custom solution was the way to go, but traditional development wasn’t fast enough. 

That’s when Ricky found a third option.

"Once we came across OutSystems, we realized there was a third option we didn’t know we needed. One that allowed us to be flexible, build at speed, apply AI to our core operations, and tailor the solution around our business instead of tailoring our business around the solution."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

Building an agentic core system with OutSystems 

With OutSystems and the support of implementation partner Accelerated Focus, Butler Plus built the “Butler Plus App”, an agentic solution that now serves as the core system for their entire business. 

The solution includes a centralized backend where operations teams manage dynamic scheduling, assign workers to communities, and monitor unit-level service needs. A customer-facing portal gives community managers full visibility into service history and overall performance.

In the field, employees use a mobile app to log services, capture live on-site evidence, and record field conditions, such as safety hazards or infractions. Every night, the 1,300 employees capture between 3,000 and 6,000 images, generating over 20,000 data points.

From there, two AI agents take over. The first analyzes images in real time, evaluating uniform compliance and hazard clearings. This agent works even offline in low-connectivity environments. The second monitors customer support communications and field data, automatically handling, translating, and routing email content into a centralized ticketing module. 

Together, these AI agents turn the volume of nightly data into clear, actionable insights with full data privacy and security guardrails built in.

"With OutSystems, all our AI agents are under one umbrella. We can see what each agent is doing, how it triggers other workflows, and how they interact, without needing siloed expertise across different tools or teams. It gives us better control, flexibility, and visibility across the whole operation."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

Butler Plus redirects $450K in annual labor toward improving service  

The “Butler Plus App” made its greatest impact by laying the groundwork for the company to launch new service offerings, including porter support, bulk hauling, junk removal, unit turns, and pest control, in as little as two weeks.

Ricky explained that managing multiple systems while navigating change management and enablement presents one of the biggest hurdles to expansion. “The key to successful expansion is providing a solution that feels unique but familiar at the same time. However, achieving that is very hard. With OutSystems, we reused screens, systems, modules, and workflows, applying minor tweaks to launch new solutions in weeks that fully integrate into our enterprise environment.”

"With OutSystems, every solution we build makes the next one cheaper and faster. Each new service line has cost about 10% of what it took to build the first, and that gap keeps growing."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

Ricky also highlighted Enterprise Context Graph, an OutSystems context layer that gives AI a live understanding of an enterprise’s systems, data, logic, and dependencies, as a key differentiator that made Butler Plus’ expansion possible.

"With the Enterprise Context Graph, we can bring AI into the development process and give it a contextual understanding of what’s happening across our system. It can understand the dependencies, make intelligent recommendations, and then act on them. It sets your brain on fire thinking about what’s possible and how fast we can move."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

As for the “Butler Plus App”, it has been redirecting people’s time from manual reviews toward business growth, enabling them to do things that weren’t feasible before.

The AI agent reduced review turnaround times from 24-48 hours to minutes. This automation returns 200 hours per week to the business, while the automated email-to-ticket workflow recovers an additional 83 hours per week. 

“People are spending less time trying to figure out what happened and what’s going on, and just focusing on executing,” Ricky added. “We’re not reporting on the past. We’re changing the outcome of the future and refocusing what the team does to bigger, impactful things within the business.” 

By automating manual processes, Ricky projects $450K a year in labor now going to coaching, client communication, and service quality instead of producing insight the platform delivers in minutes.

From a delivery standpoint, the solution went live in six months, half the time originally projected, and achieved 100% adoption with zero outages across a workforce of 1,300 workers. 

"OutSystems has been the fuel that has enabled us to pivot, expand, and move quickly. It unlocked new capabilities in a fraction of the time, at 100% of what we wanted to do."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus

Butler Plus and the future of agentic development 

When asked about the advantage of using OutSystems for a successful agentic strategy, Ricky highlighted the platform’s orchestration capabilities: “Agent Orchestration puts the guardrails in place, so the system proactively manages itself. This way, we don’t have to constantly audit or adjust code to prevent data leakage or privacy issues. It’s all built in. That gives us the peace of mind to do AI right.”

"The ability to orchestrate an agentic enterprise will transform our operations. We are no longer just using AI for isolated tasks; we are deploying governed agents that handle mission-critical processes, while maintaining strict compliance."

Mike Schmitt

CEO

Butler Plus

Ricky also pointed to the move of OutSystems toward an open ecosystem where developers can use their preferred coding agents under the platform’s governed environment. 

"Looking forward, OutSystems Agent Experience is a dream that I didn’t think was going to come. It only takes one new model or capability to unlock a totally different way of working. So, the ability to swap models, without starting from scratch every time is not just about saving costs; it’s about building a smarter business. No out-of-the-box solution comes close to OutSystems."

Ricky Rodriguez

Senior Director of Business Operations and Systems

Butler Plus