# What is Service Catalog?

Also called catalog of services.

A service catalog is a published list of the services a team offers, each with a description, who may request it, what the requester must supply, and the expected turnaround. Applied to AI agents, it states plainly what work can be requested from them. The concept comes from IT service management and transfers with little modification.

The catalog serves two audiences. Requesters learn what is available and what a well formed request looks like, which cuts the back and forth that consumes most of a simple request's elapsed time. Providers gain a boundary: work not in the catalog is either declined, or added deliberately with its own turnaround commitment, rather than absorbed silently.

Each entry typically carries a name, a one line description, required inputs, the expected turnaround, and an owner accountable for the outcome. For agent-delivered services the owner is a person, not the agent. Naming a human owner is what makes the entry actionable when something goes wrong, and it is the field most often omitted.

Catalogs decay predictably. Entries are added when a service launches and rarely removed when it stops, so an unmaintained catalog lists services that no longer exist while omitting several people use daily. Review on a fixed schedule is the usual remedy, with unused entries retired rather than left as accumulated noise.

Scale should match the organization. A large enterprise catalog runs to hundreds of entries with request forms and approval routing. A small team's catalog is a short shared document listing perhaps eight things, and that version delivers most of the benefit for a fraction of the effort. The failure mode at small scale is building the enterprise version.

## Key points

- Lists offered services with inputs, turnaround, and owner
- Owner is always a person, never the agent
- Cuts clarification cycles on incoming requests
- Decays unless reviewed and pruned on a schedule
- A short shared document suffices for small teams

## In practice

A marketing team of three publishes a six entry catalog. One entry reads: competitor page monitoring, requires a list of URLs and a check frequency, returns a change summary within one business day of any detected change, owned by the head of marketing. Requests arrive with URLs already attached, which removes the clarification exchange that previously preceded most of this work.

## Related terms

- [Scope Of Work](/en/glossary/scope-of-work)
- [SLA For Automated Work](/en/glossary/sla-for-automated-work)
- [Task Delegation](/en/glossary/task-delegation)
- [Agent Template](/en/glossary/agent-template)

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