With Serval, Mercor onboards thousands of contractors in minutes, automates 50% of IT tickets, and enables teams to build automations with zero coding, all while operating 24/7 for a global workforce.
Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor
Artemas Radik
Head of Team Platform, Mercor
Derek Shimozawa
Product Manager, Payments, Mercor
Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor
Company name
Mercor
Industry
AI Expert Training Data
Company size
~250 FTE, 150 Contractors
30,000+ Expert Contractors
Mercor is a rapidly scaling AI company. They partner with all the leading AI labs and enterprises to train frontier models using human expertise. The company serves approximately 450 users (including 250 full-time employees and 150 contractors) and maintains a marketplace of over 30,000+ experts across multiple time zones and continents. The company’s explosive growth created unique challenges for their lean IT and infrastructure teams.
Dana Stocking joined as Head of IT just five months ago, inheriting an environment with no formal ticketing system. They had just a Slack channel struggling to keep up with support requests. Artemas, Head of Team Platform, bridges IT, infrastructure, security, and product engineering, working on critical initiatives like rolling out Okta to support over tens of thousands of monthly active users. Derek Shimozawa leads payments product management, partnering closely with the engineers who ensure thousands of experts get paid accurately and on time.
Manual processes blocked Mercor’s scaling.
As Mercor scaled globally, their operational challenges multiplied across teams:
No proper ticketing infrastructure and growing ticket volume. The IT team was managing support through a Slack channel, leading to requests falling through the cracks with no 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 traditional hours.
Manual contractor onboarding: The team was manually creating Google accounts for contractors in a separate domain, processing dozens of requests weekly with no automation in place.
Click ops everywhere: Engineers needed to run database queries against production systems. The process required multiple manual steps. As Artemas described it: "You'd have to open up a tool to connect to the database, make sure those credentials have the proper authorization, actually run that request, and then report back the results."
When Dana joined Mercor, he had a unique opportunity: he could build the IT infrastructure from the ground up. Unlike most IT leaders who inherit legacy systems, Dana could select tools purpose-built for the AI era. After Dana chose Serval, multiple teams started to see the value of Serval and implement it into their own functions.
Seven teams, one platform: What started as an IT automation tool quickly became infrastructure for the entire company. Today, Serval powers workflows across seven teams at Mercor:
IT: Automated ticket resolution, software access provisioning, and 24/7 global support
Infrastructure: Database query automation with approval workflows for 14 database administrators
Payments: Ticket triaging, payment investigation automation, and feature request management
Engineering: Self-service database access and automated ticket categorization
Security: Audit trails, access validation, and compliance workflows embedded in every automation
HR: Contractor onboarding workflows processing thousands of accounts
Support: Automated responses to expert community questions with links to documentation
This cross-functional adoption wasn’t planned from day one. Teams saw IT’s success and built their own automations often in hours, not weeks.
What convinced Dana wasn’t just Serval’s AI capabilities, it was transparency. “As I was building the workflows in natural language, I could then go and see exactly what the code was in a little sidebar to make sure it was doing exactly what I wanted,” he explained. Being able to verify the actual code before deploying automation gave him confidence.
Derek’s first impression centered on speed: “I was able to implement my first workflow in a couple of hours, demo that to the team, and within the day, we were already using it to automate triaging for tickets.”
For Artemas, the value was strategic: Mercor could focus on impact rather than building AI agent infrastructure from scratch.
"The cost of having, effectively, a coworker to sit next to you and help support your team is near zero in setup from the start. Might as well just do it now"
Artemas Radik
Beyond IT, Serval has become a platform for teams across Mercor to build their own automations. Artemas calls this “automating the automation.”
Teams add Serval to their channels with near-zero upfront setup. Serval observes how team members handle tickets and suggests automations. Artemas describes it this way:
“Serval is able to learn from the way that tickets are being handled in that Slack channel and suggest guidance to the team leads about, ‘Hey, I observed that a bunch of tickets you just replied with this support link. Should I just start replying with this support link on your behalf when I get a ticket similar to the ones that you handled like this?’ And then you can just hit, ‘Yeah, that sounds good.’ And then all of a sudden, 50% of tickets where a team is just replying with the link to the documentation are now getting handled by Serval.”
The company maintains a separate domain for external contractors, where approximately 70 internal employees have permissions to create accounts. Before Serval, Dana was manually processing these requests weekly.
With Serval, authorized employees request new contractor accounts through Slack. Serval validates permissions, creates the Google account, and notifies relevant parties in minutes. To date, they’ve onboarded thousands of contractors using this automation.
"We were able to onboard ~4,000 of our Mercor experts and it only took minutes"
Dana Stocking
Head of IT, Mercor
With team members and contractors distributed internationally, Mercor needed IT support that never sleeps. Serval provides AI-powered assistance around the clock.
“Being able to use an AI bot to basically answer all of those questions for people allows me to answer things while we’re sleeping, get people way quicker responses than we would if we were waiting for a human to interact,” Dana said.
Dana now tracks zero-touch tickets—issues resolved completely by Serval without any human intervention. “Right now I’ve got our zero-touch tickets up over around 50%. That’s zero human interaction,” Dana explained.
Serval started by answering simple questions from Notion documentation, then Dana automated software access requests by connecting Serval to Okta and their single sign-on (SSO) setup.
For a company handling payments for thousands of global contractors, security isn’t optional. As Dana put it: “Right now we are very much in a public spotlight, and we’re an internationally growing company. Without having a really strong security foundation, we won’t be able to keep our end users safe and keep the company safe.”
Serval’s audit trail and approval workflows provide the security foundation Mercor needs. Every database query includes full context, including who requested it, business justification, and what data was accessed.
Artemas and his infrastructure team automated database queries against production. Now engineers post SQL queries in a public #dba Slack channel. Serval validates the query, then escalates to 14 trusted database administrators who approve or deny with a single click.
"We've been able to basically remove the need for any humans to be in the process except for that critical decision-making step"
Artemas Radik
What's Next
Mercor’s vision is to embed Serval as core infrastructure, not just a tool. As Dana put it when describing his ideal tech stack:
“Anytime I start building a new tech stack at a company now, it will always definitely include Serval. At the core of it, operations is just the most important thing. And being able to automate this much of my day-to-day operational tickets means that we have time to focus on everything else that’s important.”
For a company scaling globally with thousands of contractors, 24/7 operations, and ambitious growth targets, Serval isn’t just saving time—it’s making that scale possible with a lean team.
Payments automation
Derek's team is exploring using Serval to complete full payment investigations:gathering data from multiple sources, diagnosing issues, and even preparing automated payouts with engineer approval as the final step.
Advanced database operations
The infrastructure team plans to automate more complex database workflows and expand self-service access for engineers.
Broader IT automation
Dana continues identifying high-volume ticket types to automate, working toward even higher zero-touch resolution rates.
The suggested guidance feature is enabling a new operational model at Mercor. As more teams experience the ease of building automations with Serval, adoption is spreading organically.
“The cost of having, effectively, a coworker to sit next to you and help support your team is near zero in setup from the start. Might as well just do it now,” Artemas noted.
Derek experienced this firsthand: “I was able to write my first Serval workflow in a couple of hours, demo that to the team, get feedback really quickly, tweak it, and within the same day it was automated for us.”