LittleHorse
Building Business Advantage Beyond the SaaS Stack

Colt McNealy, Founder & Managing Member

LittleHorse provides a powerful action layer that allows enterprises to codify and orchestrate business processes across the SaaS applications they already use. Its Business-as-Code platform allows organizations to define how work should move across applications, AI agents and people, along with the context they need to participate in those processes. Rather than relying on the insufficient automation capabilities in individual platforms, enterprises can define how their own processes should operate across those systems.

That control gives enterprises a way to move beyond the limitations imposed by their SaaS platforms. Companies that historically bought software can begin creating capabilities specific to the way they operate, without replacing their SaaS investments or maintaining a massive engineering organization. They can codify business logic around their own requirements, observe how processes perform and refine those capabilities as their needs evolve.

"For years, enterprises adapted their business processes to fit the software they bought. Business-as-code reverses that relationship by allowing software to adapt to the business," says Colt McNealy, founder and managing member.

Beyond Integration Toward Enterprise Orchestration

Business-as-Code emerged from McNealy's experience building enterprise software for the real estate industry. The platform he worked on grew to more than 150 microservices alongside external SaaS applications such as Salesforce and Rippling. Individual workflows could involve several dozen microservices, making it difficult to track a process or understand what went wrong when something failed.

Retries, circuit breakers, dead-letter queues and timeouts added further complexity. That experience led McNealy to develop the first part of the LittleHorse platform around reliable workflow execution across microservices and external integrations.

"Agents make the decision, and then the deterministic process is orchestrated by the system."

The same challenge appears for enterprises built around SaaS platforms. They may connect Salesforce to NetSuite or synchronize information between applications, yet those connections primarily govern data exchange, leaving the business process itself without a mechanism to manage its progression.

Process orchestration governs what happens around that exchange, defining how work progresses across connected systems, what happens in what order and how long-running activities are managed from beginning to end.

LittleHorse’s action layer coordinates those activities across enterprise systems while leaving each application in its role as a system of record. Organizations can define how work should move between those systems, while the workflow itself becomes an asset that can be developed independently of any single application.

That separation gives enterprises a way to change the logic connecting their systems without having to change the systems themselves. Business processes can evolve as operating requirements change while the underlying applications continue performing their established roles. Business-as-Code is more flexible and easier to adapt than the automation capabilities built into off-the-shelf SaaS applications.

Making AI Work Within Enterprise Operations

As enterprises introduce AI agents into these processes, the challenge is determining where they should exercise judgment and how their decisions should fit into the workflow. An agent may be capable of making a decision or completing a task, but that capability has to fit within the larger process around it. The key is separating the agent's decision from the actions that follow. That distinction matters because the ability to make a decision does not mean an agent should control everything that follows. Large language models are well-suited to interpreting information and reasoning through ambiguous situations. Enterprise operations, however, often depend on sequences that should remain consistent. A customer support agent may determine whether a customer wants a refund or a return, but the subsequent actions should follow established business logic.

LittleHorse's Business-as-Code approach separates those functions. AI agents contribute where judgment is required. Once a decision is made, the workflow takes over and executes the defined sequence. Coding agents can produce Business-as-Code workflows, and business users can review them through the dashboard.The separation reduces unnecessary model usage while keeping repeatable process steps consistent. Workflow execution also creates a record of what the agent decided and what happened afterward, supporting traceability and compliance.

"Agents make the decision, and then the deterministic process is orchestrated by the system," says McNealy.

Human oversight can remain part of the same model. Business-as-Code allows organizations to define points where an agent can act independently and where a process must pause for human verification. This gives them a way to introduce AI into operational workflows while retaining accountability.

Turning Workflow Execution Into Operational Intelligence

Once those processes are running, their execution data can provide a view into how the business operates.

LittleHorse brings that visibility through Saddle Command Center, a centralized interface for managing and observing workflow execution. Teams can trace individual process instances from initiation to completion and see the systems involved, decisions made by agents, failures and retries. It also provides a single place to define the process template, process metadata and workflow itself, giving teams a consistent view of how a business process should operate across distributed systems. Because Business-as-Code codifies processes in code, they can be tested, version-controlled and validated.

For years, enterprises adapted their business processes to fit the software they bought. Business-as-code reverses that relationship by allowing software to adapt to the business.

Saddle Command Center can also push workflow events to Apache Kafka at meaningful points in a process, allowing execution data to flow into an organization's existing data infrastructure. This creates a stream of operational data that can be analyzed to identify inefficiencies and detect anomalies as processes run.

A vegetation management company shows how this approach can translate into measurable gains. It manages about 8,000 trucks and 100,000 pieces of equipment while coordinating field crews clearing vegetation around power lines. The operations previously depended on several SaaS platforms alongside spreadsheets and email. They lacked adequate visibility into truck locations, equipment availability and job progress.

LittleHorse helped the business build an end-to-end system for equipment purchases, maintenance, repairs, resource rerouting, job bidding and execution. It also built a command-center heat map showing the location of trucks in the field.

The new insights exposed idle capacity and inefficient routing. The business could fulfill more jobs with the same number of trucks, increase sales without expanding its fleet and scale without increasing its back-office operations. It also identified inefficiencies in how jobs were bid, helping reduce unnecessary costs.

Expanding the Business-as-Code Model

LittleHorse is now focused on reducing the implementation work enterprises need to undertake themselves. One upcoming capability will allow customers to create and configure AI agents declaratively, connecting them to MCP servers and integrating them directly into business workflows.

Industry-specific starter kits are also part of the roadmap. These packages will combine connectors, tasks and workflows around particular modernization and automation requirements, giving enterprises a more direct starting point for applying Business-as-Code to specific operational needs.

LittleHorse is also building stream processors that can turn execution events into business intelligence, bringing more of that analysis directly into the workflow environment as processes run. A combination of AI agent automation and workflow orchestration has earned LittleHorse recognition as a Top AI Agents Automation and Workflow Orchestration Platform 2026.

That combination gives enterprises greater control over how their existing technology works together and how business processes operate across it. As their needs evolve, LittleHorse provides a foundation for continuously refining those processes and building new capabilities around them.