The Thermometer, the Doctor, and the Missing Anatomy
- Sunil Dutt Jha
- Nov 13
- 2 min read
A thermometer doesn’t heal the body.
And an AI-enabled thermometer won’t either — the fever sits in the organ, not in the sensor.
If you don’t know the anatomy of the body — where each organ is, — how it works,
— how it connects to other organs —
— what exactly are you diagnosing, and
what do you expect any tool to do?
Reading the temperature on a thermometer doesn’t make you a doctor. It just tells you something is wrong, somewhere.
For a diagnosis, two things must exist before the thermometer comes in:
Anatomy must exist.
Someone must know that anatomy and how it works together.
Pharma keeps assuming that adding AI on top of an existing tool will turn that tool into a diagnostic instrument.
But the truth is straightforward:
**A thermometer doesn’t heal the body.
And an AI-enabled thermometer won’t either — the fever sits in the organ, not in the sensor.”**
A thermometer can only tell you:
the temperature,
the intensity of the symptom,
and whether the fever is rising or falling.
But it cannot tell you:
which organ is stressed,
which internal system is failing,
what process is blocked,
or how the internal components are interacting.
That is exactly what is happening with AI in pharma commercial operations.
AI dashboards — the “AI-enabled thermometers” — show:
low call productivity,
fatigue signals,
drop in access,
poor engagement patterns,
slow message response,
inefficient sampling,
misaligned sequences.
But they can’t tell you where the real problem sits because the problem is not a P5 tool problem.
The root cause always sits one perspective deeper — inside the anatomy:
P1 – Strategy misaligned.
P2 – Process fragmented.
P3 – Logic outdated or contradictory.
P4 – Components unstructured or inconsistent.
AI at P5 measures the fever. But the fever is coming from P1–P4.
Adding more AI simply gives you:
more refined measurements,
more elegant dashboards,
more accurate symptoms.
But symptom precision is not system correction.
This is why pharma leaders keep saying:
We added AI. The numbers look clever. But nothing changes in reality.
Because the AI-enabled thermometer can only report the condition —it cannot heal the underlying anatomy.
Only then does a thermometer have any real meaning.
Now look at what we are doing in pharma:
We don’t have a shared, working “sales anatomy” (P1–P4) for the enterprise.
We don’t have a clear map of how Strategy, Process, Systems/Logic, and Components are actually wired across D1–D15.
But we keep adding more “thermometers” — dashboards, AI scores, engagement heatmaps, territory scores.
If the purpose is only to build thermometers, then yes —keep going. Make them colourful. Make them “AI-enabled.”
Attach more charts, more alerts, more animations.
Because at that point, the unspoken belief is:
“The fever is inside the thermometer, not inside the organ.”
And you are not alone.
Most enterprises are doing exactly that — investing heavily in smarter instruments without first agreeing on the anatomy they’re supposed to be measuring.
Until the Enterprise Anatomy (P1–P4 × D1–D15) is made explicit and mapped:
AI at P5 is just reading numbers.
Leaders are just reading better thermometers.
Nobody is curing the disease.
That’s the real gap this series is exposing.
