# IT can bring coding agents to every department

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/it-can-bring-coding-agents-to-every-department/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Jake Stauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/jake-stauch/) · Jake Stauch is co-founder and CEO of Serval. · Built Serval, an AI-native IT service management platform that automates help desk, access management and enterprise workflows.
- Host: [Sarah Guo](https://realalpha.app/people/sarah-guo/) · Founder, Conviction · Ex-Greylock partner; early investor in Cognition, Harvey and Mistral.
- Host: [Elad Gil](https://realalpha.app/people/elad-gil/) · CEO, Gil & Co · Investor in Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase and Anthropic; co-founded Color.
- Show: No Priors
- Episode: [Taking on ServiceNow: Coding Agents for the Rest of Us with Serval Co-Founder and CEO Jake Stauch](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/), Oct 29, 2026
- Moment: 3:04 to 6:29 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/it-can-bring-coding-agents-to-every-department/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=184

## Quote

> “we build a platform that brings **coding agents to IT departments** who then can bring it to HR and finance and people teams and legal teams.”
> — [Jake Stauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/jake-stauch/) at [3:54](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=234) · No Priors

## Takeaways

1. IT can act as the builder for companies without software teams.
2. Staging, approval cycles and audit trails govern what goes live.
3. Service accounts can enable access beyond an employee’s permissions.

## About this segment

Jake Stauch explains how coding agents let IT build tools for HR, finance and other teams, with approvals and audit trails. That structure makes broad automation safer in large enterprises.

From “Taking on ServiceNow: Coding Agents for the Rest of Us with Serval Co-Founder and CEO Jake Stauch”, Oct 29, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[3:08](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=188) And that's engineers using it to build applications for their business or products, other things. And what you folks have been doing is really pioneering expansion of the category in terms of saying we should let anybody internally, an IT person, et cetera, build internal products or tools that can be used broadly across the enterprise. You're basically providing, like, coding agents for all the internal stuff for people who often aren't that adept at coding.

[3:32](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=212) So can you talk more about that? I think it's, like, super fascinating. Yeah, we love this idea of coding agents for the rest of us because we think so much of the early enterprise adoption in AI has been engineering teams. And if you think about why that is, there's a lot of reasons. Obviously, early adopters and a lot of different technologies. But also, they're able to build and experiment with these tools because they have this process of code review.

[3:49](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=229) It's very safe for even a 19-year-old intern to build something very powerful and then go through this process before it goes into production. We want to bring that same capability to the rest of the enterprise. So we build a platform that brings coding agents to IT departments who then can bring it to HR and finance and people teams and legal teams. And they can do it because under the hood, it's coding agents, but then you have all these abstractions and guardrails and controls.

[4:12](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=252) So things go through approval. They go through a staging and approval cycle and audit trail and all of that. And so it's how do you build a system that makes it easy for everyone to be a builder? And the core insight here was that IT actually wants to build stuff. And for most of the world, they don't have an engineering department. They have an IT department. Most companies have an IT department, not a team of software engineers.

[4:34](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=274) And so IT is what's building and configuring technology for the company. And we're building essentially the AI platform for them. How does that run into things like all the different more like workforce agents that are being developed, like DOT from OpenAI, or, you know, some of these things where you almost have a virtual assistant that will go and do things for you. Yeah, I think those really work well for consumers and SMB and even a lot of the mid-market organizations. In a large enterprise, there's so much, and I didn't even...

[5:00](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=300) really appreciate this going in. There is so much process around approvals, around what you can and can't do. The permission sets of any individual are so limited that even if you are allowed to bring your agent to work, which a lot of cases you're not, what it can do is so incredibly limited. It can barely even read your emails. And so when you think about all the stuff you need to do at work and all the systems you want to touch and all the interesting automations you could build, your personal permissions end up being so limited that these personal agents are also incredibly limited and not all that useful. So what we can do, because we work with these IT teams that can connect with service account credentials and admin level permissions, we can create a structure where people can access elevated permissions and do all these crazy

[5:45](https://realalpha.app/v/EZcWEsMuLb4/?t=345) things in the org, but with very, very strict deterministic approval cycles, workflows that are deterministic, and an audit trail because under the hood, we are also a ticketing system. So you say, okay, I want my agent to go do X, Y, and Z. Well, most organizations are going to be very uncomfortable with that at the large enterprise scale. But with Serval, that's going to create access requests that go through an approval process, and all that's going to be documented and logged, and then you can get just-in-time access to be able to run that deterministic workflow one time, and all of it's going to be tracked. And yes, it's a little bit more annoying than the magical personal agent experience we love with Instinct and Muse and all these tools. But it's what has to be true for a large enterprise, especially a regulated