Summary
On the No Priors podcast, Serval co-founder and CEO Jake Stauch explains how his company is taking on ServiceNow by bringing code-generation agents to IT and enterprise teams. Serval lets people who are not engineers build internal tools and automations, positioning itself as coding agents for the rest of us.
Stauch traces the idea to his years at Verkada, where IT leaders consistently named ServiceNow as the platform they spent the most on and liked the least. He describes it as powerful but slow to customize, often needing consultants and running six to twelve months behind what teams want, while costs keep rising.
The conversation turns to the tension between agent autonomy and enterprise safety. Stauch argues that agents able to write code and act on company systems create unbounded security risk unless they run inside guardrails, approvals, and process, which is the role Serval aims to fill. He points to Fox Corporation, which adopted Serval company-wide, as an example of customers and the people leading adoption benefiting from the shift.
Looking ahead, he expects personal agents to become a standard part of work, likely separate from personal ones, and sees governance of those agents as a major opportunity.
📺 Source: No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups · Published October 29, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
