About
The background behind the systems on this site.
Paul Henkelman is an enterprise AI executive with 10+ years leading AI strategy, architecture, and delivery at Fortune 100 scale, and 30 years across systems, networking, security, and software. He designed and delivered Charter's first customer-facing agentic AI service, whose demo was presented at every level of leadership including to the CEO and whose design became the company-wide reference architecture, and he architects the AI platforms behind a 30M+ subscriber network.
Thirty years of running real infrastructure left one durable conviction: AI starts to matter when it becomes dependable infrastructure. Models are the easy part. The hard part is everything around them: orchestration, observability, data discipline, security, design that expects failure. Demos skip all of that, which is why so few of them survive contact with production.
2025 – Present
Charter Communications (Spectrum)
Emerging Technology (R&D). AI strategy and architecture for new-business initiatives, with daily VP-SVP partnership and recurring EVP and CEO-level delivery: Streaming Concierge, the AIOps platform, GPUaaS, agentic standards, and Charter's internal AI curriculum. Serves on the AI Center of Practice guiding Data & AI governance company-wide.
2023 – 2025
Zarpar Consulting
AI architecture consulting across financial markets, media/CDN, and network analytics: a nightly-cadence market analysis and equity recommendation engine, ML-powered CDN route optimization with reinforcement learning, and ultra-low-latency inference pipelines with drift-aware retraining.
2010 – 2023
Comcast
Pioneered Comcast's enterprise AIOps platform during a deliberate senior-IC chapter: scaled AI-driven anomaly detection 10x across critical telemetry systems, built ML alerting and event-correlation pipelines that reduced false-positive alerts by 92%, and engineered petabyte-scale telemetry architectures with GPU-accelerated model serving.
1996 – 2010
IHG · Cox Communications · U.S. Navy
Manager of Infrastructure Development at InterContinental Hotels Group; Sr. Manager of Engineering & Operations at Cox, leading a 45-person engineering and operations organization. The foundation: U.S. Navy technical operations and security for classified systems, holding Top Secret/SCI clearance and leading technical teams in high-stakes environments.
Georgia Institute of Technology
GPA 4.0 · expected May 2027. Graduate coursework spanning machine learning, deep learning, and financial modeling.
University of Phoenix
Runtime behavior is the measure of an architecture. A system nobody can observe or roll back is unfinished, however good the prototype looked.
Author and instructor of a full AI curriculum: deep technical sessions for engineers, and a compressed executive course on how LLMs actually work. Leaders who understand the machine make better decisions about it.
Still writes the code: prototypes, fine-tuning runs, open-source tooling. Architectural judgment stays sharp only when it is regularly tested against a compiler and a production incident.