Robinhood is a company built to remove friction—inside and out

"Our IT readiness was always one stop behind the company growth," Urbishnu Sanyal, senior engineer at Robinhood, explained what happens to infrastructure when a company scales faster than the systems built to support it.

Robinhood's mission to democratize finance has helped it grow to 27 million customers with more than $314 billion in assets under management.

Inside, the structure that had supported a startup was now supporting a much larger, more complex organization in a heavily regulated sector. More than 250 support queues had developed across departments because anyone in the company could spin up their own intake for support. IT had its own queue, and so did HR, legal, and facilities, each reflecting how the company had grown. An employee needing help with a password, a benefits question, and a new software request might have to navigate three different entry points, each with its own process.

"Our teams were drowning with password requests, policy questions, benefit questions...all these could be resolved if an employee knew where to go to find that information,” said Sanyal.

When Robinhood acquired other companies, “Things started to get really difficult,” said Sanyal. “Now we needed to onboard new systems, more employees, and scale at a rapid pace.”

For a company whose entire identity was built on removing friction from financial markets, the opportunity was clear: apply that same standard internally.

Robinhood built the foundation before they built anything else

Along with Sanyal, Jay Hammonds, Head of Technology Operations, set out to do just that. Their approach was deliberate and methodical.

On using ServiceNow, Sanyal said, “We needed a solution that aligned with our tech stack, supported our growth, and met our regulatory requirements. ServiceNow checked all the boxes.”

Sanyal and Hammonds had both seen what poor AI foundations produce, including inconsistent responses, low trust, user abandonment, and broken data pipelines.

Both agreed that addressing issues early would prevent larger problems later. Before turning anything on, they committed to setting a solid foundation.

So, before a single use case went live, they standardized the knowledge base, documented IT and HR service processes, established ownership of every workflow, and rebuilt employee services on ServiceNow. Only then did they begin layering AI into those experiences.

AI adoption started with password assistance, now AI deflects 70% of all employee requests

Robinhood introduced Moveworks from ServiceNow as the front door for employee support. Whether an employee needed a password reset, software access, or guidance on an HR policy, the conversational experience began the same way, in Slack. Behind the scenes, ServiceNow IT Service Management and HR Service Delivery routed each request through standardized workflows, regardless of which team fulfilled it.  

Success spread beyond IT to HR, legal, procurement, facilities, travel and expense, and compliance. With Moveworks embedded in Slack, every department could offer the same employee experience without creating its own intake process.

"We started with 250 service workflows and 10 years of sprawl as a company,” said Hammonds. “Today, we’re down to just a handful.”

Whether an employee needed IT support or an HR service, requests now followed a common set of governed workflows instead of dozens of disconnected processes.

Despite supporting a much larger operation, the technology operations team remained just eight people.

The ServiceNow investment was put to the test

During a period of cost scrutiny, Robinhood’s leadership reviewed every significant vendor relationship, including its investment in Moveworks. A lower-cost alternative was evaluated but didn’t perform.

Robinhood signed a multi-year renewal and accelerated. The team of 8 employees showed that they can effectively scale services on the ServiceNow platform even as the company grew and changed at an unprecedented rate.

"We ultimately saved more than 2,200 hours per month with ServiceNow," Hammonds said. "I think we made the right choice."

Employees kept using Moveworks, and the numbers held up across every measure

Today, Robinhood deflects 70% of employee requests without human intervention, with 94% employee satisfaction and 90% internal support satisfaction.

“We’ve been able to achieve these results because we’ve had a strong partner. We’ve been diligent about our planning, and very thorough about what problem we were trying to solve in our success matrix,” said Hammonds.

Robinhood tracks $2 million in annual time savings and a 6X return on AI investment, reviewed at the CISO level every quarter.

The core eight-person team delivered a significant result, challenging the assumption that AI transformation requires large teams, big systems integrators, and massive budgets. Staying lean is one of Robinhood's core principles. The team remained small by design, believing the right foundation could support growth without adding operational overhead.

“I'm happy to say that we achieved so many more positive outcomes because of the ServiceNow platform and the AI that they have provided for us,” said Hammonds.

Robinhood now has one platform, hundreds of use cases, and a faster path to onboarding

The same foundation that unified 250 support queues now coordinates onboarding workflows across IT and HR, allowing newly acquired employees to be up and running in weeks rather than months.

"With ServiceNow's new AI-driven offerings, we can bring new teams and acquired entities live in weeks, not months," Hammonds said. "That is real speed-to-value."

The team is also building toward a service-aware CMDB as a system of truth, automating hardware lifecycle management, and hardening the platform with Zero Trust and RBAC.

Hammonds credits much of that speed to the governance built into the platform. "The guardrails in place allow us to move faster toward any of our goals because we don't have to think about that," said Hammond. "It's already in place."

The goal is to automate routine, high-volume requests through agentic workflows, including an IT Tier 1 help desk agent, freeing the human team to upskill and focus on higher-value opportunities for the business.

"We want to upskill the human talent we have to focus on other areas of opportunity for the business," said Hammond. "The day-to-day is handled by the agentic workforce. That's really where we're headed."

For Hammonds, the next milestone is 80% ticket deflection, but it's not the finish line. "Reaching our next deflection goal will allow us to continue using our engineering resources to solve the next problem, and the one after that."

These days, the question Robinhood is asking is not how to deploy AI. They already answered that three years ago. The question is how far a powerful foundation and eight people can take an enterprise.

“Now we’re in a place where we’re looking ahead," said Hammond. "We’ve been able to save time, consolidate resources, and become a central place for knowledge for all things Robinhood.”