My name is Patrick Banholzer. I love my family, music, IT, and since a while also the smell of fresh wood shavings.
What drives me
For more than 15 years my work has revolved around one question: why is a person still doing this by hand? It started with Linux servers and clients that ran fully automated, went on to DevOps, infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines, and today it goes far beyond IT. Automation is everywhere routine eats time: in approval processes, in failure analysis, in reporting, and at home.
With large language models this has reached a new level. Tasks that could not be automated two years ago because they needed reading, understanding and judgement can now be supported by AI agents. That is what excites me most right now, and it is what I want to bring to my clients: finding the AI use cases that really speed up their processes, and building them so that they run reliably and keep the data safe.
Day job
At Mercedes-Benz AG I am bring-up manager and software integrator for the ADAS software stack (driver assistance and automated driving). I lead task forces for complex integrations, coordinate deliveries and escalations, and drive continuous testing.
My favourite part: building AI-driven automation for our integration work. LLM agents connect to defect tracking, CI/CT results, build logs and code repositories through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), do the root cause analysis and bisect faulty software versions, so that failures get fixed faster. Before that I built continuous testing environments, migrated our CI/CD pipelines from Jenkins to GitLab CI and wrote an LLM-based build log analysis tool.
Earlier I ran 2,300+ Ubuntu desktops at Mercedes-Benz with Saltstack in a GitOps fashion, and before that I led a team of seven for IT infrastructure at IT-Designers Gruppe. The details are in my CV.
Consulting
Since 2021 I have been consulting municipalities, businesses and startups on the side, from IT assessments and cloud infrastructure to automation. Today the focus is on automation and the safe use of AI: what I offer.
At home
I implement a lot of so-called enterprise technology at home, simply because I love it. A Proxmox host runs my firewall, Nextcloud, Paperless and a few more services, all managed with Ansible. The network is split into VLANs, so neither the vacuum robot nor the washing machine can see my computers.
The heart of the house is Home Assistant. It steers the solar system, house battery and wallbox together, so the car charges from surplus without draining the battery. It runs heating plans, awnings and shutters, a night alarm and a lot of small helpers, across Homematic, Zigbee, Shelly and more, all local and without cloud lock-in. And since an AI assistant can read and change the configuration through MCP, building new automations has become a lot faster.
I will write about the setup and my automations on the blog, bit by bit.
Off the keyboard
Music. Heavy metal is what I like most – Lamb of God is my favourite – but I also enjoy classical music, jazz, swing, some hip-hop and electronic music.
Woodturning. At the lathe nothing is automated except the dust extraction. Have a look at my workshop.
Scouting. I volunteer with the scouts (DPSG).