IT service management (ITSM) is now a core fixture of enterprise IT strategy. Yet for most employees, getting support still means raising a ticket and waiting. According to Jake Stauch, co-founder and CEO of Serval, that's not a coincidence. It's a symptom of legacy ITSM tools that were designed to manage requests rather than resolve them.
According to him, this is a dynamic that has consistently underdelivered on the true promise of ITSM automation and, as a result, enterprise service management.
Serval is an AI-native enterprise service management platform backed by Sequoia Capital, with a $1 billion valuation. Less than two years old, it has already landed enterprise customers including General Motors and Fox Corporation — and its founding premise is that the automation problem at the heart of ITSM has never been properly solved.
Speaking on Bloomberg's Tech Disruptors podcast with analyst Anurag Rana, Stauch made the case that the industry has been measuring itself against the wrong benchmark for years.
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Tracking Requests Was Never the Goal — Resolving Them Was
Stauch's argument starts with a straightforward observation: the best possible outcome of any employee support request is instant resolution. Not logged. Not assigned. Resolved. As Stauch points out:
"The world doesn't need a better ticketing system"
He adds that: "Certainly you could build a nicer ticketing system, but that's not really what the problem is...It is delivering a better experience. And the best possible experience for employees is that when they make a request, that request is instantaneously resolved."
Whether it's a password reset, a laptop replacement, an application access request, or an HR policy question — Stauch argues the technology to automate all of it exists in theory. The reason it rarely happens in practice comes down to one thing: ITSM automation is genuinely hard to build.
His illustration is easy to picture. An employee types into Slack or Teams that they've spilled water on their keyboard and need a replacement. In most enterprises today, that message becomes a ticket, assigned to someone, who logs into a separate procurement system and manually places an order. Multiple people, multiple systems, significant lag.
"From your perspective, you did one thing - you typed out a sentence - and then you're going to get whatever it is that you're asking for," Stauch said, describing what he believes the process should look like. He explains:
"There should be no manual effort around that."
The productivity argument is equally direct. Stauch notes the value isn't just in freeing up IT support staff — it's in unblocking the employees waiting on them. "...If you're needing a password reset, you're probably blocked from doing something. If you're making an access request to a certain application, you're probably blocked from doing some part of your job."
He frames the end goal as unlocking meaningful work — getting people back to what they were hired to do, rather than waiting in IT queues.
Why Legacy ITSM Vendors Can't Fix This — Even When They Try
The obvious question is why established enterprise service management platforms haven't already solved the automation problem. Stauch's answer is structural, and he applies it well beyond any single vendor.
He argues that platforms built before the current generation of AI face a fundamental constraint: their architecture predates the tools that would make deep automation accessible, and their existing customer base makes radical change nearly impossible. He summarizes:
"When you're dealing with a legacy architecture, it's tough to make an overnight shift..."
"You've got a massive customer base that can't make that shift, that can't upgrade all of their systems and dependencies overnight... And so you're kind of stuck supporting a customer base that is giving you life... but you can't make radical changes to the product", Stauch adds.
It's a pattern he sees across legacy ITSM and pre-AI enterprise software broadly. The cost and complexity of configuring these platforms has begun to outpace the speed at which organizations actually need to change.
"Your process is going to change much faster these days than it's going to take to implement a lot of these legacy software solutions...the implementation, the cost to configure, starts to eclipse the pace at which companies are looking to make changes and roll out these automations and new tools."
