Serval Powers Together AI’s
Just-in-Time Access Strategy
With Serval, Together AI automates 95% of just-in-time access requests, delivering a robust, transparent, and scalable security foundation.
Derek Chamorro
Head of Security, Together AI
Todd Thiel
Senior Manager of Enterprise Security, Together AI
Kate McGraw
IT Support Specialist, Together AI
Todd Thiel
Company name
Together AI
Industry
AI Infrastructure
Company size
~250
Together AI is one of the most ambitious companies building the future of open-source AI infrastructure. With rapid growth and increasing complexity across their internal systems, the company’s lean IT and security teams are responsible for supporting a fast-scaling organization without slowing it down.
The security team is deeply innovative and forward-thinking. Derek leads security strategy, Todd leads enterprise security and identity, and the first IT support hire, Kate, manages onboarding, ticketing, and day-to-day IT operations. Initially, IT ticketing and access management ran through Linear, which wasn’t designed for IT use cases. As Together AI scaled, the volume and complexity of requests quickly outgrew their existing tools, increasing both operational drag and security risk. It was clear they needed a more flexible, automated solution.
Manual processes and limited tooling were slowing the team down and making them less secure:
Ticketing through Linear was cumbersome and lacked automation. It was not built for IT teams.
Access provisioning for infrastructure and applications was manual, error-prone, and time-consuming.
Together AI evaluated Zendesk and Freshservice, but neither was flexible enough to support its mix of basic IT and complex identity workflows.
As Todd explains, building proper workflows manually with legacy tools "would take me three months." This timeline is fundamentally incompatible with the speed at which Together AI operates.
The team wasn't actively searching for a new tool. In fact, Kate says they were "about to sign a contract to roll out [another system]" when they met with Serval. But after hearing what Serval was building and why, she was "immediately hooked."
In a quick proof of concept, Serval created a Google Group via its natural language interface, demonstrating that it can build and publish workflows almost immediately with just a few words of instruction.
Todd quickly realized how far he could push the platform: "Serval empowers engineers to quickly ideate, test, and build authorization logic faster than anything I've seen. You're only limited by your creativity."
Kate says Serval is "like having another IT teammate," taking on repetitive work and intelligently routing exceptions, freeing the team to focus on strategic projects.
"It's like having another teammate."
Kate McGraw
IT Support Specialist, Together AI
Todd’s favorite example of Serval’s impact happens on a commuter train. On his way to work, he built some of the company’s first complex infrastructure workflows entirely through Serval’s natural language interface in just a couple of hours. Today, he feels that "with Serval, I can create complex guidance, workflow, and approval logic in a day, before lunchtime—historically, that would take months with legacy IT service desk solutions, and weeks with modern just-in-time access tools."
Serval now automates 95% of Together AI’s just-in-time access requests and assists with the remaining 5%. It tracks each request’s full conversation, including duration and business justification, giving Together AI a single source of truth for approval, review, and audit.
"Serval is performing all of the authorization logic for granting access to infrastructure for us, and it’s doing it in a transparent way."
Todd Thiel
For Derek, Serval’s biggest security value is how it precisely controls just-in-time access and provides necessary guardrails in any situation, calling out that "most importantly it deprovisions automatically so that it's not dependent on the host to remember to remove access, which improves security and compliance."
Serval gives the security team guardrails and visibility without slowing employees down. Derek sums it up: "I don’t see Serval as just being a core ITSM tool — I see it as a tool that any security team can use as part of their user access reviews or their day-to-day security operations."
Together AI has more than doubled in size since adopting Serval and automating significant parts of access management. Kate shares the day-to-day impact: "Serval has allowed us to free up a lot of time for a million other things that we have to do, like help the company grow and build a bigger team." Derek notes the broader impact: "We’ve saved days. Serval gets rid of a lot of the low-level stuff that was the most painful to do and allows us to be able to focus on the future."
"We’ve saved days, not minutes or hours, but days of time of having to wait because Serval does a lot of the automatic provisioning for us."
Derek Chamorro
Head of Security, Together AI
Admins and employees benefit alike. Serval’s natural language interface feels so human that many users don’t realize it isn’t. As Kate notes, "The feedback on Serval has been positive so far. People are really impressed by how it sounds like they're talking to a person. I think a lot of the time they don't realize they're not talking to us when they're having conversations on the tickets."
What's Next
The team plans to extend Serval’s automation deeper into IT ticketing, including onboarding/offboarding workflows, device and SaaS app provisioning, and common IT requests like password resets and distribution list changes. On the infrastructure side, they aim to automate more Terraform and AWS IAM role workflows, continuing to replace manual processes with policy-driven automations.
With day-to-day work handled by Serval, the IT and security teams are turning their attention to:
Building out a more mature identity governance program, including finer-grained access reviews and role lifecycle management.
Redesigning the employee onboarding experience to be faster, more consistent, and less error-prone — including automated device setup and just-in-time role provisioning for new hires.
Investing in strategic security architecture improvements, rather than firefighting operational bottlenecks.
Encouraged by IT’s success, other teams at Together AI are starting to explore Serval for their own workflows. Early pilots include:
Engineering triage automations for permissions and CI/CD environment access.
People Ops workflows, like automating role-based access during org changes.
Developer self-service tooling, reducing dependency on IT for routine infrastructure requests.
Serval is evolving from a security automation platform into a trusted internal automation layer across the entire organization.