How SafetyCulture handles massive demand with AI agents
Impact
- 200+ business users of production apps across sales and marketing
- 100,000+ hours saved annually on lead research and outreach
- 25% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
“AI is embedded across our business, but Retool is the platform our GTM teams have truly rallied behind. It integrates directly with our existing data stack and makes that data actionable in a way other tools haven’t.”
—Josh Young, Senior Manager, Marketing Technology, SafetyCulture
SafetyCulture is a workplace operations platform helping frontline teams in manufacturing, retail, transport, and hospitality the knowledge, tools and confidence they need to meet higher standards, work safely and improve every day. The Australia-based company generates 500,000 free team signups annually—most through their extensive checklist library.
But rapid growth created a challenge: growing demands on the GTM team. SafetyCulture turned to Retool to build AI agents that handle lead research, personalized outreach, and lifecycle marketing—freeing their team to focus on what matters most: solving customer problems.
Company overview
- Industry: SaaS, workplace operations
- Headquarters: Sydney, Australia
- Regions: Global, with offices in Kansas City, Austin, Manchester, Manila, and Amsterdam
- Retool capabilities used: Agents, Workflows, Apps
- Use cases: AI-powered lead enrichment and outreach, lifecycle personalization, custom GTM app layer
- Data sources: Redshift, Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom, Slack, Zoom, ZoomInfo, Gong, Amplitude, Google Maps
When growth outpaces your team’s capacity
SafetyCulture has an enviable problem: too much demand. With roughly 500,000 new users signing up every year (and counting), their BDR team wasn’t scaling at the same pace.
The company’s customers span 180 countries and come from industries that aren’t traditional technology buyers: manufacturing, retail, transportation, and hospitality. These frontline teams need SafetyCulture’s platform to digitize paper processes and empower workers to report issues, but identifying the highest-fit prospects and engaging them effectively was becoming impossible.
The math was brutal: of those 500,000 annual signups, roughly 100,000 would eventually speak to sales. Each lead deserved 10-15 minutes of research and personalized outreach. That’s 100,000 times 15 minutes—or multiple lifetimes of work per year.
“Our reps were drowning in busywork,” says Josh Young, Senior Manager of Marketing Technology at SafetyCulture. “Tasks like calendar back-and-forth and manual research, trying to understand why each person signed up and what problems they were trying to solve.”
Why other AI platforms failed
Like many companies, SafetyCulture explored the rapidly expanding AI landscape to solve this challenge. The team evaluated a wide range of platforms in an effort to bring AI into GTM workflows. A lot of the tools looked impressive at first, but none of them made it into production for GTM teams.
The problem was integration, not the AI capabilities themselves. Most standalone AI platforms could not plug into SafetyCulture’s ecosystem deeply enough. They did not connect properly to critical data sources and could not handle the messy data.
“What we learned is that we need to transform raw data from our warehouses before feeding it into AI,” Josh explains. “Other platforms just take data as-is and can never work it out. That leads to hallucinations and all kinds of issues.”
Josh and his team realized they needed a platform that could sit inside their environment and act as a transformation layer. It had to clean, shape, and enrich the data before AI agents touched it. Without that foundation, even the most sophisticated AI would produce unreliable results.
Retool was the first solution they were able to put into production from a GTM perspective. It integrates deeply into SafetyCulture’s systems and supports the data transformation needed to make AI outputs trustworthy and actionable.
Building an AI-powered GTM engine with Retool
Josh joined SafetyCulture in December 2023, bringing years of Retool experience from his previous roles. When he arrived, SafetyCulture didn’t have Retool yet. “I felt like I was missing a limb,” he says. “Retool was just the platform I did everything in.”
Bringing Retool to SafetyCulture was transformative. The team has built mission critical apps that 200+ employees across the organization use. They’ve created a channel called “Retool Feedback” where the internal business users can request features, often shipping them within 20 minutes.
“As we continue to scale, maintaining speed is critical. Retool enables us to move from idea to impact in record time.”
—Josh Young, Senior Manager, Marketing Technology, SafetyCulture
But the real game-changer came with Retool Agents. Because SafetyCulture was already using Retool for apps and workflows, all the data connections and integrations were in place. When agents launched, SafetyCulture could build and scale automated work within a secure, governed environment.
The AI BDR: scaling personalized outreach
Of those half a million sign-ups, about 100,000 leads per year require personalized attention. So SafetyCulture built an AI inbound BDR to handle research, outreach, and meeting booking.
The agent starts with a Salesforce Lead ID, then fetches contact details, pulls HubSpot page views to understand intent, checks ZoomInfo for employment history, and identifies whether prospects have used SafetyCulture at another company. It selects relevant customer examples based on industry and country, then compiles a personalized email and adds the lead to a Gong Engage flow.
“The agent researches all of our leads and builds customized outreach emails to them,” Josh explains. “Something that would take 10-15 minutes can be done in seconds. It’s helping us to contextualize why they’ve come to SafetyCulture and the problems they’re trying to solve.”
The AI Auto BDR looks at which pages prospects visited before signup and pulls in enrichment data. But Retool is the platform that ties everything together.
“Retool helps write really concise, engaging emails in a way that reps just don’t have time to give each individual lead that much care and attention.”
The result is a 3x increase in meeting booking rates and a 2x increase in opportunities created.
A single interface for GTM teams
SafetyCulture also built a custom Company Viewer and Lead Console that consolidates data from multiple systems into one interface. Before, BDRs would juggle five or six different tabs per lead—Salesforce, HubSpot, Amplitude, Gong, and more. “It’s just not scalable,” says Josh.
Now, the Lead Console brings in call transcripts from Gong, feature usage data from Amplitude, customer data platform events from Segment, and AI enrichment data from Redshift. It auto-generates SPICED frameworks from calls and includes an AI agent that can answer any question about an account.
The Lead Console led to a more than 25% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate and consistent pipeline growth. BDRs save 30 minutes per opportunity with automated hand-offs.
“It helps us have better conversations with customers and solve their problems faster,” Josh says. “And our people can just get more work done faster and in a more enjoyable way.”
Lifecycle personalization and lead enrichment
SafetyCulture built additional AI agents to handle lead enrichment and lifecycle marketing. The enrichment agent calls five data providers in parallel, fact-checks information against public sources, and even searches OSHA’s API for US-based leads to provide context around workplace risks—achieving near-100% coverage.
For lifecycle marketing, the team built a feature recommendation engine that analyzes over 300 use cases to suggest relevant features based on peer behavior. AI generates 2,500+ copy variations that are dynamically inserted into lifecycle communications, delivering a 10% lift in feature adoption.
“We’re helping our customers get value from our product faster as a result of the work we’ve done in Retool,” Josh says. “Retool’s directly responsible for that.”
The transformation layer that makes AI work
“The data is everything,” Josh emphasizes. We’ve all seen the stats—95% of generative AI pilots fail. “Retool is different.”
The key is Retool’s ability to handle SafetyCulture’s messy, real-world data, Josh explains. “Retool allows us to transform data it receives from our warehouses or third-party enrichment in a way that we know the AI will understand,” Josh explains. “Other platforms take data as is and can never work it out. We never had those problems with Retool.”
This transformation layer enables everything else. Clean, well-structured data reduces hallucinations, generates reliable outputs, builds trust with end users, and enables faster iteration. SafetyCulture built everything knowing that new starters could log in and the app would just make sense. “We literally don’t have documentation for Retool,” Josh says. “Which is really powerful.”
A new way of working at scale
The impact extends beyond metrics. SafetyCulture’s sales teams now spend their time connecting with customers and solving problems while AI agents handle research, outreach drafting, and data compilation. The speed of iteration has changed expectations—features requested in the Retool Feedback channel often ship within 20 minutes.
Most importantly, SafetyCulture’s customers get the full value of SafetyCulture faster with more relevant outreach, faster response times, and personalized recommendations.
What differentiates Retool from other AI platforms they tested? “Retool already had all those connections to all of our data via the app-building platform,” Josh explains. “The agentic capabilities were such a great evolution because it was already within our system. That’s why it just worked.”
Ready to see Retool in action? Get a demo with a Retool expert or start building for free today.