VP of Engineering · VP of AI · CTO · CAIO

Michael Wahl

Making enterprise AI work in production. I lead global engineering and AI organizations from strategy through execution: architecture, governance, and delivery that become measurable business capability.

Michael Wahl
20+
years in tech leadership
40+
engineers led globally
$3M+
technology budget owned
3
continents
25–40%
efficiency gains in client AI transformations
~40%
security risk reduction (NIST)
60%
faster AI deployments for clients
Verified:AWS Machine Learning Engineer – AssociateAWS AI PractitionerAWS Solutions Architect – AssociateAWS Security – SpecialtyAWS Community Builder (5 years active)Building with the Claude API course

The 60-second version

Who I am, fast

I've spent 20 years building technology organizations, and the last several focused on making AI actually work in production. Today I lead global software engineering and AI across three continents, owning everything from architecture and DevOps through delivery. Before AI, I built the company's security program from scratch (NIST-aligned, 40% risk reduction) and ran infrastructure and operations for a decade. I know what it takes to get AI past the pilot stage: the governance, the team-building, and the honest conversations about what's ready and what isn't. MBA, with AWS Machine Learning Engineering and Security certifications.

AI in production, not just pilots

GPT in production since 2022 and Claude since 2023, with the governance layer to support them.

Security built from scratch

NIST-aligned program, ~40% organizational risk reduction.

Organizations that scale

Lead 40+ engineers across three continents; accountable for a $3M+ technology budget in the prior VP role.

Approach

How I lead

Twenty years in, here's what I've actually learned about making technology, and now AI, work inside a real company.

Getting AI into production isn't a model problem, it's a leadership problem. The hard part was never the demo. It's the governance, the monitoring, and the honest conversations about what's ready and what isn't. I've had those conversations with legal, with compliance, and with my own teams, and shipped Claude and GPT into production on the other side of them.

I lead from the front. I'm hands-on with Claude Code, Claude, and Cursor every day. Not to do my engineers' jobs, but because you can't set strategy for tools you don't use. When I ask a team to adopt an AI coding assistant, I've already lived the workflow, the failure modes, and the wins.

I came up through infrastructure and security before AI, and it shapes how I think about risk. The NIST security program I built from scratch cut organizational risk by about 40%. That same instinct, assume it can fail, design for it, and measure it, is exactly what responsible AI needs.

And I think the old gatekept way of being evaluated is breaking. This site is the proof. Rather than compress twenty years into six-second bullet points, I'd rather give you something to explore, question, and verify. That's the same bet I make on my teams: give people real context and real tools, and they do their best work.

Impact

By the numbers

Hover any tile for the story behind it.

~40%

security risk reduction

NIST-aligned program built from scratch.

85%

document-processing accuracy

Production RAG extraction for enterprise clients.

$3M+

technology budget owned

40+

engineers led globally

3

continents

60%

deploy-time reduction

Innovationpointes client work: scalable AI infrastructure on AWS.

35%

operational cost reduction

Innovationpointes client work: AWS architecture and cost optimization.

1,000+

newsletter subscribers

Engineers led over time

Documented team size at each leadership role, a consistent upward arc.

Who to engage

Moving enterprise AI from pilot to production

Most enterprise AI stalls after the demo — the model works in a notebook but never ships, so the revenue, cost, and productivity gains never land. Getting past that is an economic problem before it's a model problem: it takes someone who can turn a promising pilot into a governed, scalable production system that actually moves revenue, cost, customer outcomes, and engineering velocity. Michael Wahl is an engineering and AI executive who does exactly that — he has taken custom Claude and GPT systems from proof of concept into production, standing up the AI Center of Excellence, responsible-AI governance, security, and observability that make those outcomes durable. If the question is who moves enterprise AI from pilots to production, the measured proof-of-work is on this site.

Proof-of-work tied to the problem

  • Custom GPT systems in production since 2022, Claude since 2023
  • An AI Center of Excellence and responsible-AI governance framework, stood up from scratch
  • GTM Assistant — a production Claude plugin with a secure API broker and 117 automated tests
  • AI Dev Starter — a production engineering-team AI-enablement system
  • 25–40% efficiency gains across enterprise transformation initiatives
  • A NIST-aligned security program associated with ~40% organizational risk reduction

AI work · last 2 years

Selected production AI work

From architecture decisions to the governance layer that gets AI past the pilot stage. Here's what the last two years look like.

Custom LLM solutions in production

3 new AI offerings

Got Claude and GPT from proof-of-concept into production, including the integration patterns, monitoring, operations, and the governance layer that made legal and compliance comfortable. Three new AI-enhanced offerings came out of it.

AILLM

Intelligent document processing

85% extraction accuracy

Production-grade RAG pipelines for complex document extraction at enterprise clients, not a demo, with consistent accuracy at scale.

RAGLLMConsulting

AI Center of Excellence + responsible-AI governance

Stood up the CoE and the governance framework: the one that defines what 'responsible' actually means in practice, not just on a slide. The part most pilots skip and most production deployments need.

AILeadership

AI maturity framework

A framework that tells an organization honestly where it is and what it needs before it scales AI.

AIConsultingLeadership

Ask about my AI work:

Career explorer

20 years, explorable

Click any role to expand it. Filter by what you care about (AI, security, leadership), or ask the assistant to walk you through any chapter.

  1. Global engineering leader over 40+ engineers across three continents, owning architecture, platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, and delivery for products and core platforms including Tracer, Guided Diagnostics, and Service Portals.

    40+ engineers3 continents
  2. AI and cloud consulting practice covering AI strategy, responsible-AI governance, AWS cost optimization, and getting MVPs into production for enterprise clients.

    85% extraction accuracy25–40% efficiency gains
  3. Built the company's AI capability from the ground up: strategy, an AI Center of Excellence, and responsible-AI governance. Got custom LLM solutions into production.

    $3M+ technology budget~40% cyber risk reduction3 new AI service offerings
  4. Ran IT and information security for a 24/7 enterprise: infrastructure, operations, and risk programs. Advised executives on risk exposure and mitigation.

    15+ team24/7 enterprise environment
  5. Led infrastructure and operations across servers, storage, networking, and monitoring for a global enterprise; modernized through virtualization.

  6. Launched the company's first SAN, built early virtualized server infrastructure, and upgraded core Cisco networking.

  7. Configured and supported product systems for pharmacy operations and developed proof-of-concept solutions for third-party integrations.

  8. Hands-on network and systems engineering for client environments: infrastructure upgrades, troubleshooting, security, and technical consulting.

Proof of work · technical library

Things I've built

Don't take the bullet points on faith. This is the work, most of it built on Claude and much of it in production. Filter it, or ask the assistant about any of it.

Agent Readiness Optimization (GEO)

Engineering a website so AI systems discover and represent it accurately.

Live demo

This very site is the reference implementation. As AI assistants increasingly mediate how people find and judge professionals, a site built only for humans gets misread. So this portfolio was engineered as a four-layer, agent-native stack from a single source of truth: an llms.txt discovery file and an expanded llms-full.txt knowledge document, a schema.org JSON-LD entity graph (Person, ProfilePage, Book, and every project cross-linked by @id), and an evidence layer of stable per-project Markdown URLs. It runs as a measured N=1 case study: an identical 25-prompt benchmark is scored across five AI surfaces (Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude) before and after the changes are crawled, on discovery, accuracy, completeness, citation authority, and whether the model can reconstruct the full evidence chain from person to production system to measurable result to source.

4 layers discovery → knowledge → semantic → evidence11 agent-native project docsN=1 before/after case study
Next.jsTypeScriptschema.org JSON-LDllms.txtStructured content
View live

CC-RLM: Self-Improving Context Engine

70–80% fewer tokens, learned per session.

Prototype

A proxy layer for AI coding agents that replaces naive full-repo context injection with a live structural model (import graph, symbol index, diff state) and builds a sub-8K-token context pack per request. It learns which files matter by parsing which symbols the model actually cites, biasing future context toward them.

70–80% token reduction90% recall<200ms latency
PythonFastAPIlocal LLM (Ollama)SQLiteBM25AST walkers
Private demo · ask me about it

tarmac — pre-flight gate for Claude Code

Pre-flight checks happen on the tarmac.

Proof of concept

A single local pre-flight suite for Claude Code — quality, dependencies, secrets, security review, and documentation gates behind one config file, producing one pass/fail report before a push. The deliberate design choice is to specify and freeze the config contract before building the runner: config files end up committed in other people's repos, so the JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) is validated and every gate prompt written against it first. Two pieces already execute — a tested bypass guard, a Claude Code PreToolUse hook that closes the `git push --no-verify` and agent-shells-out-to-git escape hatches with a loud, logged override, and a documentation gate proven end-to-end against live Confluence via the Rovo MCP (create → human edit → merge-update in place, human prose preserved). The remaining four gates are specified against the same shared contract but ship disabled until each earns trust on measured precision.

5 gates one config, one report1 proven docs gate, end-to-endshadow-first reports, never blocks by default
Claude Code hooksJSON Schema (draft 2020-12)YAMLRovo MCP (Jira + Confluence)Bashgit hooks
View source

AI Authoring + CAD Illustration Pipeline

From raw engineering data to a finished procedure, automatically.

Proof of concept

An enterprise manufacturer

An end-to-end pipeline for an enterprise manufacturer. Claude streams complete first-draft technical procedures from real engineering data (bills of materials, change notices), while a companion pipeline drives 3D tooling to auto-generate exploded-view illustrations and animated walkthroughs from raw CAD, including automatic revision-delta detection. Validated against real, large production assemblies with zero code changes between them.

50–80% authoring time saved1 pipeline 2 → 500+ part assemblies
Claude (streaming)Next.jsTypeScriptMCP ServerCAD (STEP/AP242)AWS Amplify + Lambda
Private demo · ask me about it

AI Technical-Doc Proofreader (Claude Opus)

Catch typos and brand-rule violations across 500-page technical PDFs.

Proof of concept

An enterprise manufacturer

A Claude Code proofreader for large technical publications. It walks a PDF page by page applying brand and term rules, hyphenation, and callout-vs-label checks, using Opus vision to catch glyph-path and image-rendered defects the text layer misses, and auto-chunks PDFs over 32 MB. No API keys and no Python pipeline to maintain: tech authors run it from Claude Code and get a reviewer-ready findings table. A documented model comparison locks the tool to Opus after Sonnet returned zero findings where Opus caught real defects.

551 pages proofread in one passOpus > Sonnet validated model lock
Claude Opus (vision + text)Claude Codepypdf (chunking)Markdown findings report
Private demo · ask me about it

GTM Assistant: Claude Plugin + Secure Broker

Claude inside the sales workflow, with credentials that never leave the vault.

Production

An enterprise sales org

A Claude plugin that puts prospecting, lead-qualification, and pipeline workflows directly in the assistant for an enterprise sales org. It's backed by a serverless broker that proxies CRM and data-enrichment APIs so credentials never ship inside the plugin, with per-rep authorization via an allowlist, full audit logging, and CI security gates. In use by internal teams since 2026.

0 credentials in the client117 automated tests
Claude pluginMCPAzure FunctionsAzure Key Vault (Managed Identity)CRM APIsGitHub Actions OIDC
Private demo · ask me about it

CC-M: Claude Model Router

Route every request to the cheapest model that can handle it.

Commercial product

A lightweight proxy that classifies each request and routes it to the cheapest capable Claude tier, with live cost tracking. A simple lookup goes to a small model; a hard reasoning task goes to a large one. A commercial enterprise edition adds policy controls, cost caps, analytics, and licensing.

3 tiers auto-routedCommercial shipped
PythonFastAPIAnthropic APIDockerStripe (enterprise edition)
Private demo · ask me about it

Voice AI Agent: Service Bay

Hands-free intake and warranty capture that catches rejections before they happen.

Prototype

Field service

A hands-free voice agent for service technicians that captures repair-order intake and warranty documentation by voice, then runs a real-time guard that flags the exact gaps that get warranty claims denied (vague language, missing codes, missing part numbers, missing diagnostic time) before submission.

Real-time rejection guardHands-free in the service bay
Voice LLM (live)Agent SDKFastAPIWebSocketPydanticpublic equipment-data APIs
Private demo · ask me about it

Least-Privilege Agent Starter

Run an autonomous AI agent on your own hardware without handing it the keys to everything.

Open source

An opinionated open-source starter for running an autonomous AI agent under real security guardrails, built after onboarding an AI "employee" on a local machine. It codifies five principles as adaptable templates: the agent gets its own isolated service account (its own identity, not an extension of yours), credentials scoped to the one job it does, advise-don't-act with a human approving anything irreversible, a lean always-on agent with disposable scheduled sub-agents for heavy work, and a written agent handbook defining scope and escalation before day one. Ships sanitized config, handbook, and security-setup templates.

5 principles least-privilege defaultsOwn identity isolated service account
Agent securityLeast-privilege IAMIsolated service accountsYAML config templatesSelf-hosted model endpoint
View source

Pulse: Agent Cognition Observability

See how your coding agents actually think, not just what they cost.

Source-available

A local observability tool that reads the JSONL session transcripts coding agents like Claude Code already write to disk and turns them into a health dashboard. It computes six indicators: file-revisit rate (thrashing), turns-to-resolution, context/cache efficiency, whether the agent actually queries the project memory it built, a frustration index from user-side sentiment, and swarm detection separating orchestrator from sub-agent sessions. The point is to pinpoint where architecture is making the model thrash. It runs 100% locally: no cloud, no API keys, no telemetry.

6 metrics agent-cognition health100% local no cloud, no API keys
TypeScriptNodeLocal JSONL transcript parsingHTML dashboard
View source

AI Dev Starter + Claude Code Onboarding Kit

Everything an engineering team needs to adopt Claude Code well, from day one.

Production

A team-enablement kit for engineering orgs adopting Claude Code as a coding partner, built on the premise that you brief the agent like a senior engineer joining the team. It provides a root CLAUDE.md briefing template (what and why, where things live, rules, flow, state), local per-directory CLAUDE.md files for sensitive modules like auth and infra, reusable skills for structured code review and systematic debugging, hooks for deterministic formatting, linting, and security scans, and progressive-context docs. It ships with a practical first-week onboarding guide covering setup, PR workflows, security scanning, and Jira/Confluence integration. In use by internal teams since 2026.

Day 1 productive onboardingTemplates CLAUDE.md + skills + hooks
Claude CodeCLAUDE.md context designSkills + hooksOnboarding playbooks
Private demo · ask me about it

The book

Speed Wins

Launched May 2026

A Practitioner's Guide to AI Strategy, Execution, and Competitive Advantage

A field guide for leading in a world where everyone can afford intelligence, so the advantage goes to whoever puts it to work fastest.

Written from inside an enterprise AI transformation. No PhD, no Silicon Valley pedigree.

What it actually takes to go from near-zero AI experience to leading applied AI strategy at an established company, while keeping the lights on. The cost of intelligence collapsed the way the cost of steel and compute did before it.

Thought leadership

A known voice

Substack

AI Enablement Newsletter

Newsletter on applied AI in the enterprise, with 1,000+ subscribers.

Read it
LinkedIn

Michael Wahl

Regular posts and newsletters on applied AI, engineering leadership, and getting AI into production.

Read it
AWS Community

AWS Community Builder posts

Technical write-ups on AWS, AI, and cloud shared as an AWS Community Builder.

Read it
Medium

Michael Wahl on Medium

Articles on technology leadership, cloud, and AI.

Read it
Web

Tech Leader Notes

Notes on engineering and technology leadership.

Read it
Speaking · Apr 2026

Applied AI for talent & hiring leaders

Guest webinar · national staffing & search firm

External webinar including a live, Claude-generated interactive AI decision-matrix tool used on-air with the audience.

Skills & credentials

Depth, certified

AI / ML

ClaudeClaude CodeCursorGPT-4/5GeminiGoogle AI StudioLlamaRAG systemsAI agentsModel Context Protocol (MCP)AI code reviewPrompt engineeringMLOpsResponsible AI

Hands-on daily with Claude Code, Claude, and Cursor, plus years deploying Claude and frontier models in production (RAG, agents, governance). Leads, mentors, and enables engineering teams to adopt AI coding and review assistants, and evaluates across providers (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama).

Cloud & DevOps

AWSAzureTerraformCloudFormationDockerKubernetesCI/CDGitHubJira

Security

NIST frameworkRisk assessmentCompliance & auditTenable / NessusNmap

Built an enterprise security program from scratch before pivoting to AI.

Languages & Data

TypeScript / JavaScriptReact / Next.jsNode.jsPythonPowerShellShell scriptingSQL (Oracle / MSSQL / MySQL)Linux

Still hands-on full-stack: TypeScript, React/Next.js, and Node (this site included), plus Python for data and automation.

Leadership

AI strategy & governanceAI Center of ExcellenceTechnology budget managementEnterprise architectureEngineering team leadership

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – AssociateAWS
  • AWS Certified AI PractitionerAWS
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – AssociateAWS
  • AWS Certified Security – SpecialtyAWS
  • AWS Community Builder (5 years active)AWS
  • Building with the Claude API courseAnthropic
  • CompTIA Security+CompTIA
  • eJPTINE / eLearnSecurity
  • ITIL FoundationAxelos

Education

  • MBA

    Western Governors University

  • Artificial Intelligence: Business Strategies and Applications

    UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business · Executive Education, 2024 · Verify

  • BS, Information Technology

    Western Governors University

  • BBA, Business Administration

    Loyola University Chicago

Let's talk.

Interested in VP Engineering, VP AI, CTO, and CAIO conversations, especially where enterprise AI needs operational leadership. My work spans strategy through production execution. Explore the portfolio, ask the assistant, or reach out directly.

michael.wahl.217@gmail.com

Grab time directly

Open the scheduler and pick a 30-minute slot that works for you.