How SeatGeek went from 7,000 manual tickets to 50% automation in 60 days

Meet SeatGeek

SeatGeek is a full-stack marketplace for live events, serving millions of ticket buyers and hundreds of venues, teams, and promoters. The Business Technology team is responsible for IT infrastructure, access management, corporate systems, and increasingly, the automation layer that keeps everything running. When Elisa Folden took over corporate engineering and helpdesk, she inherited a process that depended almost entirely on manual work.

The Problem

A ticket backlog, and no path out

Before Serval, SeatGeek's helpdesk and corporate engineering team was buried in manual work, with no realistic way out:

The old way of working was not going to survive the AI era.

Two paths were available, and neither was good.

• Lock everything down: IT becomes the bottleneck, engineers route around it, and resentment builds.
• Let go entirely: shadow IT proliferates, security posture erodes, and the mess compounds.

What was needed was a third option, one that maintained guardrails while removing the queue entirely.

The Solution

An operating model, not a point fix

Within three weeks of implementing Serval, 40% of all IT requests were being resolved automatically, with no human intervention required. Soon after that, the number had surpassed 50% and continues to grow.

But the true test came when SeatGeek rolled out Claude AI to the company. Elisa and her team were hit with a similar number of tickets as the ChatGPT rollout, but this time they had an automation that provisioned access and sent login instructions to end users. The result: 406 licenses handed out to-date. Zero human touch.

The impact on IT has made the case for the rest of the business. SeatGeek is now preparing to roll out Serval across HR and Legal, with onboarding, offboarding, and employee and legal questions set to be automated in the coming months. What began as a solution to an IT ticket backlog is quickly becoming the operating model for how every function at SeatGeek handles repetitive, high-volume work.

The goal for Serval is not just to handle the queue faster. It is to make the queue irrelevant.

The Results

Building solutions, not resolving tickets

Clearing the backlog was the precondition for something more transformative. With the queue handled, SeatGeek now has the opportunity to focus its IT engineers as internal forward deployed engineers (FDEs): embedded inside business units, building solutions rather than resolving tickets, accountable to business outcomes rather than throughput KPIs.

Individuals are moving quickly into brand new roles that solve problems way bigger than SaaS config or endless tickets. In Customer Support, they've embedded talent to automate support inquiries. In Tech Compliance, they've built custom platforms to eliminate time consuming quarterly processes. In Legal, they've coded tools that bring vetted context directly into the surfaces legal is already working in, enabling automation on a scale never seen before.

Across the company, their new norm is IT engineers and BSAs building impactful custom tools and automations to replace high-cost SaaS and fill product gaps. This style of working would not have been possible before Serval helped to alleviate the ticket queue.

What started as a ticket problem has turned into something far bigger: a fundamental rethink of what an IT team can be. The queue is gone. The real work has just begun.