Atomicwork vs Serval (2026)

Coworkers act in outside systems through native integrations and MCP tools, including SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Azure Active Directory, Intune, Okta, ADP, Workday, Slack, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, JumpCloud, Entra ID and Salesforce. They provision and deprovision access, refresh stale tokens and run RCAs, and every tool call runs under deterministic execution policies scoped to named capabilities.

Sourceatomicwork.com/features/ai-workforceread 2026-09-08

The integration catalog runs to 164 documentation pages, indexed at docs.serval.com/llms.txt, with a page per connector. Ticketing covers ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk and Freshservice, bidirectionally, so a customer can keep existing tooling during migration. Identity covers Okta, Microsoft Entra, LDAP and Active Directory, plus SailPoint for governance and RSA SecurID for MFA. Endpoints run through Jamf and Tanium and HR through Workday.

Knowledge comes from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive and Slab, collaboration from Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace, and finance and operations connectors include Coupa, Salesforce, LaunchDarkly, Vanta and Presidio. Connectors take authenticated action rather than mirroring data.

For RSA SecurID, Serval stores the client key encrypted and attaches it automatically to every call it makes on the customer's behalf, and workflows drive a full MFA flow, starting, verifying, checking and canceling attempts on demand. For Presidio, Serval exchanges credentials for a short lived JWT and reads asset records on the customer's behalf whenever a Serval workflow runs, with the regional endpoint chosen by the workflow.

Both happen at execution rather than by background sync. Provisioning is the heaviest write path, with automated provisioning and deprovisioning via SCIM, direct API or custom workflows, and just in time access grants revoked automatically when the window ends. Access can also be revoked via API. Serval's AI knows the endpoint catalog and can help build workflows against it. Connector maturity is labeled, with RSA marked Beta in the integrations UI.

Sourcedocs.serval.com RSA SecurID and Presidio integration pages, with the integrations indexread 2026-09-12

Multi-coworker swarms investigate, act and close together. Smart routing tags in and hands off work across IT, HR, Finance and Legal, every handoff carries the full history, and humans are escalated in with the full picture. In a typical handoff the Device Ops coworker pulls in Network Ops, or the Incident Manager pulls in the Access Manager. The Business and Enterprise plans add multi-agent orchestration, and AI workflows come on every plan.

Sourceatomicwork.com/features/ai-workforceread 2026-09-08

A workflow can call another as a step through child workflow composition, workflow journeys can be viewed as dependency graphs, and workflows can be organized into folders, shared across teams, tagged, searched semantically and versioned with diffs. Temporal is listed among the required datastores as the workflow orchestration component. It is a durable execution engine, so a run survives process restarts and resumes, which holds long running, multi step work together when people interrupt it.

Workflows can pause for approval, and Serval also has conditional forms in Slack, criteria based assignment rules, a default triage team for ambiguous requests and ITIL aligned change management. The Automation Agent turns natural language descriptions into TypeScript, so automations build themselves from a description. Serval markets deterministic workflows rather than execution the model improvises, since the model writes the workflow and the workflow then runs the same way every time. Workflows and skills are managed as code in Git with version diffs.

The participants include the employee raising a request, three named agents with different jobs, approvers who can be delegated to or overridden by a team manager, assignment groups and external ticket subscribers. Work spans ticketing, just in time access, asset management, onboarding and offboarding, compliance workflows and campaigns, with Security, IT, HR, Finance and Operations each able to run isolated environments on the same platform.

Sourcedocs.serval.com release notes index and self-hosting prerequisitesread 2026-09-12

Coworkers run on schedules for nightly cleanups, weekly reviews and monthly audits, and on events. An Incident Ops Engineer detects and triages incidents before humans are paged, an Incident Manager monitors third-party SaaS incidents, and ticket-event workflows act on ticket activity, so a reply classified by sentiment on an open ticket can trigger escalation or closure. Channels are chat, voice, email and portal on every plan, with Slack, Teams and a browser extension.

Sourceatomicwork.com/features/ai-workforceread 2026-09-08

Workflows can be triggered by events and by webhooks, which let any external system act as an event source, as well as by Slack reactions, SLAs and ticket assignment, and campaigns can be triggered directly from a workflow. Child workflow composition lets one flow start another, and tickets, access requests and onboarding events all start work. Schedules are a separate mechanism, covering recurring campaigns, assignment schedules, SLAs with business hours and pause conditions, and automatic ticket bumps for unresponsive requesters, a time based trigger acting without a person.

The Help Desk Agent covers intake and resolution across Slack, Teams, email, phone and portal. Further channels include an embedded widget with a live agent and multiple email intake addresses per team, along with Microsoft Teams notifications and reply routing improvements, conditional forms in Slack, dynamically rendered forms, a Serval Inbox consolidating notifications, and white label Slack bot customization. The UI ships in nine languages with on demand ticket translation.

Sourcedocs.serval.com release notes index and serval.com/insights buyer's guideread 2026-09-12

Each customer's knowledge sits in a self-hosted vector database in its own tenant, and customers control what is crawled and indexed across knowledge sources and conversations. Access control lists are inherited from the source systems or configured in Atomicwork. Coworkers are grounded in the customer's policies, people, assets and history through retrieval-augmented generation over knowledge base content and IT asset metadata, querying a persistent, permission-aware index.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

A native knowledge base, in beta, sits alongside the synced stores and is maintained in Serval, with knowledge base management, knowledge tagging within guidance, lexical and keyword search alongside semantic retrieval, cross team KB sharing, and a tag catalog with owners set for teams, resources and roles. Answers ground in help docs built in Serval or synced from Notion, Google Drive, Confluence and Slab, and reviewers can publish approved knowledge updates into Notion, Slab, Confluence, Freshservice and ServiceNow, so corrections flow back out to the systems of record.

Retrieval respects permissions at read time through knowledge source permission enforcement, so an employee cannot be answered from a document they are not entitled to see. The Help Desk Agent can also search the web, tickets, assets and access history are queryable alongside, and the Insights Agent analyzes ticket patterns. Serval's asset estate tracks hardware, software licenses, SaaS subscriptions and cloud costs in one schema the agent reasons over.

Sourcedocs.serval.com release notes indexread 2026-09-12

Persistent memory is a component of each coworker's agent harness alongside goals, permissions, tools and guardrails, scoped to that coworker, and handoffs carry the full history between coworkers. Atomicwork does not state how long memory lasts, where it is stored or how a customer deletes it, and no state carries over between sandboxed executions.

Sourceatomicwork.com/blog/ai-workforce-launchread 2026-09-08

Per team guidance, knowledge sources and configuration persist in Serval, but none of these is a memory that learns per user over time, and no agent memory is described. Guidance, now called Skills, is a set of written procedures and runbooks the customer authors so agents follow internal practice, with a diff view for suggested changes and version history. It persists because a person wrote it down, not because the agent retained anything.

The native knowledge base and the corpora synced from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive and Slab are the knowledge layer, and workflows, skills and settings managed as code in Git are authored artifacts. The runtime stack uses PostgreSQL as the primary application database, Redis for caching and ephemeral state, and Temporal for workflow orchestration.

Temporal keeps a workflow run alive through restarts, but that is state within one execution, and no component in the stack holds what an agent learned. There is no named memory layer, no retained preference the agents reapply for a user or requester, no decision trace carried between tickets, no stated scope or lifetime for anything held, and no customer surface to inspect, edit, export or purge agent state apart from tickets, skills and knowledge. Ticket history is a record of work.

Sourcedocs.serval.com self-hosting prerequisites and release notes indexread 2026-09-12

Sensitive actions pause for human sign-off before executing. A coworker that hits its spend cap pauses for review until a manager approves more credits, reassigns it or retires it. Each coworker carries a defined scope, standing rules and an escalation plan that hands off to a human with full context, and deterministic execution policies restrict what a coworker can read and modify. Access provisioning, suspension and employment-related decisions include human review before they are acted on.

Sourceatomicwork.com/features/ai-workforceread 2026-09-08

Workflows can pause for approval, so execution halts mid flow and waits for a person, and customers author these gates in a redesigned approval flow builder. Around them sit custom approval workflows, natural language workflow approvals, approval delegation, team managers able to override approvals from a ticket, and an approvals API for custom follow up logic. Multi step approvals apply to workflows and access requests alike.

Access requests route through approval before a grant is made, just in time access is time bound and revoked automatically when the window ends, and the access history export records the approver and the justification against every grant. Where approval is not requested, guardrails apply. Serval markets deterministic workflows with security layers, namely RBAC, approval gates, API scope limits and an air gap between help desk and builder.

That air gap means the agent that talks to employees cannot edit workflows or integration scopes, so a compromised conversation cannot widen the agent's own authority. Skills and runbooks hold agent behavior to the team's written procedures, with a diff view for reviewing changes the AI suggests before they take effect.

Sourcedocs.serval.com release notes index and serval.com/insights buyer's guideread 2026-09-12

Atomicwork holds SOC 2 Type I and Type II, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701 and 42001, CSA STAR Level 1, Microsoft 365 and CASA Tier 3 certifications, and has announced a SOC 2 Type 2 renewal. Its privacy policy still describes ISO 27701 and 42001 as in progress, though SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 appear in both the policy and the certification list.

Access runs through SSO with the customer's enterprise IAM, and customers can bring their own identity provider. Role-based access control applies, content ACLs are inherited or configured, coworkers inherit the requesting user's identity and roles with no standing elevated access, and comprehensive audit logs are kept.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

Serval holds SOC 2 Type II, states adherence to HIPAA and GDPR, and documents HIPAA-oriented deployment and data controls. It points customers to its Trust Center for the current Type II attestation report, and a written BAA covers HIPAA workloads and a DPA covers GDPR. Access management is centralized, with SAML and SCIM for SSO and user provisioning, role based access control for least privilege permissions, customizable API scopes for app integrations, and multi step approvals for workflows and access requests.

Further controls include custom roles, scoped API keys, knowledge source permission enforcement, ticket visibility groups for access controlled routing, a read only agent role, default access profiles and app owners, skills gated by access profile, and sharable access reviews. Separation of duties takes the form of an air gap between help desk and builder, so the help desk agent that talks to employees cannot edit workflows or integration scopes or change what agents are allowed to do.

Sourceserval.com/updates/soc2, /insights/hipaa-compliant-itsm and the serval.com platform pageread 2026-09-12

Every coworker run is logged with a full audit trail and is explainable. Comprehensive audit logs detail who accessed what and every operation performed within the platform, every answer links back to its source, and continuous monitoring tracks coworker performance. Audit logs are retained for 12 to 24 months, and they are kept on the same platform the coworkers run on.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

Every workflow run is logged step by step with inputs, outputs, status and duration. Serval offers a sample workflow run export with per-step detail and timestamps and an access history export with approver, justification, start/end and revocation reason, and its governance guidance tells customers to confirm that logs include per-step inputs and outputs, precise timestamps and CSV/JSON export for GRC integration.

An access record carrying the approver and the justification is an audit trail of a consequential agent action with the human decision attached. SIEM integration carries it into the customer's security estate, so evidence is generated when work happens rather than reconstructed before an audit.

Alongside sit agent powered run debugging, version diffs for workflows and skills, a guidance diff view for reviewing AI suggestions, automation suggestion history and workflow journeys viewable as dependency graphs, so a reader can see what ran, what changed and what the agent proposed.

Dashboards on request volume, time to resolution and SLA compliance measure the help desk operation, AI resolution rates show what the agent itself did, and the Insights Agent reports on ticket patterns and automation opportunities. Analytics dashboards are in public beta, with a refreshed home.

Sourceserval.com/insights SOC 2 governance page, with docs.serval.com release notesread 2026-09-12

Customers choose where coworkers run and where data sits. They can bring their own execution infrastructure, model endpoints and vault, each customer's data sits in a self-hosted vector database in its own tenant, and enterprise applications are reached through a self-hosted iPaaS. The Enterprise plan carries custom data residency, data residency options exist in approved regions, and LLM and cloud sub-processors apply by the customer's region. Atomicwork does not name the regions.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

Serval comes in four delivery models. Fully managed Serval Cloud has no infrastructure to manage, automatic updates and a 99.9% uptime SLA. In Hybrid Self-Hosted, the customer runs only the Serval worker inside its own infrastructure while Serval operates the backend, control plane, web app and database, so the worker is the only Serval component that ever touches the internal network or handles integration credentials.

Fully self hosted comes in two operating modes, Managed in Your AWS and Self-Managed on Your Kubernetes. It is single tenant in an AWS account the customer owns, the application runtime and all customer data remain in that account, and the customer's AWS credentials never leave its environment. Either the customer's team or Serval operates it, and the deployment is identical either way.

The deployment bundle holds Terraform, Kubernetes and Helm configuration and setup scripts, and the AWS stack is EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, S3 and Secrets Manager. Customers can point at their own PostgreSQL, Redis, Temporal, OpenSearch or S3 compatible storage, with the upgrade cost of doing so spelled out, and DNS requirements go down to the app and API hostnames.

Private network patterns include Site-to-Site VPN, Direct Connect, Transit Gateway and private DNS resolution. The cloud product also offers a region choice, with EU data residency available to organizations, and Microsoft GCC High is supported for US government workloads. Installation and day two operations sit in a password protected area shared with customers and evaluators, while everything needed to evaluate the models is public.

Sourcedocs.serval.com self-hosting section and release notesread 2026-09-12

Seven named coworkers shipped at launch, the Device Ops Engineer, Network Ops Engineer, Cloud Ops Engineer, Access Manager, Incident Manager, SecOps Engineer and HR Ops Specialist. Every plan includes four prebuilt coworkers, the ITOps Support Engineer and the Access, Workflow and Service coworkers, and a catalog lists them by role, each owning a distinct role. Skills are packaged as portable units, and customers can also build custom coworkers.

Sourceatomicwork.com/blog/ai-workforce-launchread 2026-09-08

Three named agents ship, each doing a different job. The Help Desk Agent handles intake and resolution across Slack, Teams, email, phone and portal, the Automation Agent turns natural language descriptions into TypeScript, and the Insights Agent detects patterns and suggests automations. Without the Insights Agent the help desk still resolves tickets, and without the Automation Agent the other two still work.

A browsable catalog of installable workflow bundles sits alongside them, with packs for specific estates such as LDAP/AD, Okta and Google Workspace, plus workflow backed catalog items and service catalog ingestion. An installable Okta workflow does work when selected, and removing it leaves the others whole. Workflows can be organized into folders, shared across teams, searched semantically and tagged. A native knowledge base and Skills add reusable content, though the customer writes those. The catalog comes from Serval, with no third party or community contribution path and no marketplace of externally built agents.

Sourceserval.com/insights buyer's guide, first party about Serval, with docs.serval.com release notesread 2026-09-12

Customers can bring their own model endpoints, including endpoints under their own enterprise DPA, and the Enterprise plan adds custom models, harnesses and runtime. Atomicwork uses three LLM sub-processors, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Anthropic and AWS Bedrock, applied by the customer's region and configuration. Within a coworker's configuration the platform routes each job to a lightweight or advanced model automatically, beneath whatever model the customer has chosen.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

Serval uses two model providers and splits the work between them, and the customer does not choose. In self hosted deployments, the customer provides its own keys for the providers Serval uses at runtime, an Anthropic API key as the primary provider for AI agents and help desk functionality and an OpenAI API key for embeddings, image description and specific model tasks. In Managed in Your AWS, the customer owns the AI provider keys and any customer-owned credentials supplied during onboarding, and an in product surface manages Anthropic usage.

The customer therefore owns the provider relationship, sees the spend and controls the data path to the model, but that is control over credentials, cost and data path, not model selection. Serval decides which provider handles which task, and there is no model picker, per agent model assignment, version pin or way to substitute another provider for either role. The key arrangement applies to the self hosted and hybrid models, and nothing says a Serval Cloud customer supplies keys.

Sourcedocs.serval.com self-hosting overview and prerequisitesread 2026-09-12

Atomicwork's native MCP server lets Claude, Codex, Cursor and any MCP-compatible client connect to the customer's Atomicwork tenant to query tickets, create incidents, manage service requests, look up users and browse the service catalog. There is no public API or SDK documentation for the platform itself.

Sourceatomicwork.com/pricingread 2026-09-08

A large API lets outside callers reach Serval. The documentation index at docs.serval.com/llms.txt lists three sections, Documentation at 142 pages, Integrations at 164 pages and an API reference at 252 pages, and two OpenAPI documents, auth-openapi-spec.yaml and openapi-spec-v2.yaml, are served from the API reference section. Scoped API keys and customizable API scopes for app integrations grant access per integration rather than all or nothing.

An approvals API handles custom follow up logic, and access can be revoked via API and workflows, so an outside caller can drive a consequential action inside Serval. Beyond the REST API there is a CLI, which can raise access requests, and user MCP, which puts Serval inside the customer's own assistant. Webhook triggered workflows cover the event side, and workflows, guidance and configuration are managed as code in Git repositories.

Sourcedocs.serval.com llms.txt index, OpenAPI spec listings and release notesread 2026-09-12

Coworkers get evals and feedback loops after deployment, with a review cycle that can run weekly because the data is already in the system, and Atomicwork tunes the coworkers themselves. Performance reporting and tuning for custom coworkers come on the Business and Enterprise plans. Atomicwork does not describe the evaluation harness itself, and the evaluations and red-teaming in its privacy policy are its own engineering practice, not a feature customers use.

Sourceatomicwork.com/pricingread 2026-09-08

Help Desk Agent evaluations are in beta, a harness aimed at the agent's own behavior. What an evaluation produces is not stated, with no score, pass rate, judge verdict or comparison format. Workflows and skills are managed as code in Git with version diffs, so a change can be reviewed before it lands.

Agent powered run debugging lets a failed run be inspected, and a guidance diff view for reviewing AI suggestions gates the agent's own proposed changes to its instructions. Serval markets deterministic workflows, so behavior repeats between runs.

Its commercial claim is a guaranteed automation rate, citing customer automation percentages, which measures how much of the customer's ticket volume the agent cleared.

Sourcedocs.serval.com release notes indexread 2026-09-12

Coworkers act through MCP tools and native integrations inside sandboxed execution, without browser, desktop or computer control. The Universal AI Coworker resolves issues with voice and vision AI, a browser extension and screen share, through which Atom reads the user's on-screen context and walks the user through a fix.

Sourceatomicwork.com/securityread 2026-09-08

Integrations and APIs are how Serval acts, not driving a browser or a computer interface, and every connector works through an API. For RSA SecurID, Serval stores a client key and attaches it automatically to every call it makes on the customer's behalf, and for Presidio it exchanges credentials for a short lived JWT and sends it as a bearer token on every request. Provisioning runs via SCIM, direct API or custom workflows. Across 164 connectors the pattern is authenticated service to service calls, and the self hosted worker exists to reach internal APIs, LDAP and Active Directory over the network, not to operate a desktop.

Serval markets deterministic workflows compiled to TypeScript. It integrates Jamf and Tanium and runs device actions across managed endpoints, with every grant, device action and workflow run exportable, and those actions go through the MDM and endpoint platforms' own APIs. The CLI, which can raise access requests, is a way for people to reach Serval, not Serval operating anything. There is no hosted or local browser, desktop session, remote control, RPA or recorder.

Sourcedocs.serval.com RSA SecurID and Presidio integration pages, with the release notes indexread 2026-09-12