From Help Desk to Automation Platform: Serval at Mercor

Mercor's IT team chose Serval. Then infrastructure, payments, engineering, security, HR, and office support built their own workflows, without a single top-down directive.

Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor

Artemas Radik
Head of Team Platform, Mercor

Derek Shimozawa
Product Manager, Payments, Mercor

"Anytime I start building a new tech stack at a company now, it will always definitely include Serval."

Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor

How Serval Helped

Company Name

• Mercor

Industry

• AI Expert Training Data

IT team

• Dana Stocking, Head of IT
• Artemas Radik, Head of Team Platform
• Derek Shimozawa, Product Manager, Payments

Meet Mercor

Mercor is a rapidly scaling AI company that partners with leading labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. Mercor internally supports 30,000+ external experts, 250 employees and 150 contractors. Their unique business model uses human expert training data to improve frontier models. As a result, they’re prolifically hiring these experts as their business grows, leading to ballooning manual onboarding tasks.

Dana Stocking joined Mercor as Head of IT five months ago, stepping into their fast-moving environment where employee support requests were handled exclusively through a Slack channel without a formal ticketing system. Among these requests were daily requests to onboard Mercor “experts” onto the proper Mercor systems - a highly repetitive task that required a number of slow, manual steps.

Other teams across Mercor were facing similar scaling challenges. For example, Artemas Radik (Head of Team Platform) was managing an increasingly high volume of database-access requests that required structured approvals. Derek Shimozawa leads payments product management, but without a reliable system to log and route contractor payment issues, higher volume made intake and triage a headache for his team. As Mercor grew, these manual processes increasingly became a bottleneck to scaling efficiently.

The Problem

As Mercor scaled globally, their operational challenges multiplied across teams:

• No proper ticketing infrastructure: The IT team was managing support exclusively through a Slack channel, leading to requests falling through the cracks without a systematic way to track or resolve issues.
• Time zone challenges: With employees and contractors spread internationally, IT needed to provide support 24/7—impossible with a small team working local hours.
• Manual contractor onboarding: The team was manually creating Google accounts for contractors in a separate domain, processing dozens of requests weekly without automation in place.
• Manual operational workflows for database access: Engineers needed database access to answer questions like “Was this person paid?”, “Why is this number wrong?”, or “What broke?” but had to request access through database administrators (DBAs) manually to provision database access. These DBAs who manually checked permissions and ran the necessary queries. As Artemas described it: “You’d have to open a tool, check permissions, run the request, and then report back the results.”

The Solution

When Dana joined Mercor, he had a unique opportunity: the company was scaling rapidly, and its internal IT systems were still early enough that he could rebuild core workflows from the ground up and choose tools designed for AI-native automation. He chose Serval because of its powerful automation capabilities.

After Dana rolled out Serval, teams across Mercor quickly saw the value and began implementing it within their own functions.

Today, Serval powers workflows across seven teams at Mercor:

• IT: Faster, automated ticket resolution and 24/7 global support
• Infrastructure: Automated database queries with approval-based workflows
• Payments: Quicker ticket triage and easily-tracked payment investigations
• Engineering: Self-service database access and automated categorization
• Security: Stronger compliance through end-to-end platform auditability
• HR: Smoother employee and contractor onboarding
• Office Support: Higher deflection on common office inquiries via FAQ and policy-linked responses

The Results

01

Onboarding thousands of experts in minutes

Mercor's business model relies on a marketplace of 30,000+ external contractors who write training data. Historically, onboarding these contractors was a manual, high-volume process - Dana manually processed hundreds of contractor onboarding and access requests each week.

Now, it’s much faster to onboard contractors, because Mercor has automated onboarding, and expert managers can trigger the onboarding themselves - removing IT as the bottleneck. First, Mercor employees can initiate Mercor expert onboarding in Slack. Then, Serval checks that the requester has the right permissions to onboard a Mercor expert, creates a Google Workspace account (email) for the contractor, and applies a role-based access template for the core tools they’ll use in their job. As a result, to date, Mercor has onboarded 4,000+ contractors with this automation.

Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor

02

Operating a 24/7 IT help desk with 50% zero-touch resolution

With team members and contractors distributed internationally, Mercor needed IT support that never sleeps. Serval now provides AI-powered assistance around the clock, responding immediately even when the team is offline.

03

Automating database access with built-in security

Engineers on revenue-driving teams needed database access to ship features and investigate issues, but manual approval processes created bottlenecks. Artemas automated the workflow while maintaining security controls. Engineers post SQL queries in Slack, Serval validates them, then routes queries to 14 database administrators who approve with a single click. What used to require multiple manual steps now happens in seconds—with complete audit trails of who requested what and why.

Artemas Radik
Head of Team Platform

What’s Next

Expanding automation depth

• Payments automation
• Advanced database operations
• Broader IT automation

With Serval, automation isn’t a long-term project or a specialized skill – it’s a natural next step after solving a problem once. The result is less manual work, faster improvement cycles, and a system that quietly gets better as teams use it.