Vernon Man
Head of IT, Perplexity
Kyle Polley
Security, Perplexity
Beejoli Shah
Communications, Perplexity
Vernon Man
Head of IT, Perplexity
Company name
Perplexity
Industry
AI / Search
Previous provider
Freshservice
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Perplexity, the rapidly–growing AI answer engine, has experienced explosive expansion in their three-year history, tripling headcount in just 12 months across multiple offices around the globe. As the company scaled, its IT infrastructure faced mounting pressure to keep pace. Initially, Vernon Man, Head of IT, handled all IT responsibilities manually – including onboarding new hires and managing a surge in support requests – while the rest of the organization rapidly expanded.
To support this accelerated growth, Matt Wu joined as IT Manager to support the workload, while Kyle Polley continued to lead security efforts. Across their team, Perplexity operates at the cutting edge of AI technology. Vernon, Kyle and Matt are enabling seamless IT and security operations that are fueling innovation at one of the world’s fastest–growing AI companies. It was time for their IT tools to catch up.
Scaling at this magnitude can be incredibly difficult and can overwork an IT team. Onboarding was a manual process, requiring Vernon to click through each application, sending invites and activating accounts one by one: “It was so manual – I’d have 10 tabs open just to get one person set up.” And as employees joined, support requests grew exponentially. The previous ticketing system, Freshservice, offered limited automation capabilities, and as Vernon put it, “We were growing fast, but our tools weren’t keeping up.”
The turning point came when Perplexity introduced Serval to relieve the IT and security teams of repetitive work and scale operations. In their first week of the pilot, Perplexity began automating their most common requests – creating Google Groups, granting tool access, and setting up new employees – all from within Slack.
The impact was immediate. Vernon no longer had to spend hours clicking through systems. Instead, he could interact with Serval briefly to onboard or offboard employees, while the platform took care of the rest behind the scenes. New engineers were automatically added to the right Slack channels and Google Groups, given tool access, and flagged to IT only when exceptions arose.
Kyle, who leads security, described Serval as “an extension of the security team,” ensuring approvals were fast, consistent, and less prone to error.
“Serval helps us practice the principle of least privilege by working with employees to identify the minimum level of access required, and ensuring it is granted only for the necessary duration. It's becoming an extension of our security team."
Kyle Polley
Security, Perplexity
In just weeks, Perplexity had 50% of all IT requests handled by Serval autonomously, with no human intervention required. The team is working to reach 80–90% automation. Their top use case is day 1 onboarding employees and has been run hundreds of times to kick off new hire onboarding.
Perplexity scaled 3× in employee count, and Vernon felt that “with the help of Serval, we were able to keep up with that scale and IT demands” despite a small IT team.
New hires quickly learned that Serval was the fastest way to get help. Some employees didn’t even realize they were interacting with Serval. One Communications Manager even offered to buy Serval a coffee after her first week because Serval was so helpful.
"The fact that Serval has connections to all of these tools makes life so much easier because employees know that Serval is the one-stop shop for getting access to these things."
Vernon Man
Head of IT, Perplexity
As Serval takes on daily operational tasks, the team can focus on more strategic projects: “Now that Serval frees up time, we’re focusing on expanding offices, integrating more applications, and replacing some solutions.” (Vernon)
"Serval really enables us to spend less time on the mundane, repetitive tasks and more time on actually improving our security and IT program."
Kyle Polley
Security, Perplexity
What's Next
Perplexity’s goal is to increase ticket automation to 80–90%,and is working closely with the forward deployed engineering team at Serval to automate more advanced workflows and adopt Serval for identity and access management. Said Vernon, “Serval can add people to any of these applications automatically instead of manually," underscoring Serval's deep access management capabilities.
As Serval takes on daily operational tasks, the team can focus on more strategic projects: “Now that Serval frees up time, we’re focusing on expanding offices, integrating more applications, and replacing our solutions that no longer meet our standards” (Vernon).
Serval’s impact has sparked adoption across the company, with teams beyond IT – including Engineering, Security, and HR – integrating it into their workflows. “Folks across Perplexity, beyond IT, are looking for ways to incorporate Serval,” said Kyle. In fact, Kyle sees Serval as starting to become “an extension of the security team.”
HR is exploring Serval to handle help desk requests for new hires, while Engineering uses it to triage and resolve operational tickets. When Beejoli in Comms joined Perplexity, she described her onboarding experience as “like having a helpful coworker in Slack,” showing off Serval’s role in shaping employee experience as Perplexity scales.