Pramod Prasanth

I chose my own name at age four. Took my father’s first name as a surname to avoid caste markers.

I grew up moving across India. Kerala, Orissa, Punjab. You learn early that systems have rules, and that context changes how people follow them.

Across global supply chains, health systems, and enterprise operations, I am building ChainAlign: infrastructure for organisational judgement.

A pattern, not a career

I have been building at the frontier of what is possible in my context since 1995, when I wrote a Windows application in a country still running DOS.

In 2007, I designed and implemented one of the world’s earliest serialisation-based supply chain systems at Syngenta: a full track-and-trace architecture creating a digital twin of the product from manufacturing line to farmer, deployed across Germany, Vietnam, India, and Brazil. The same backend powered an anticounterfeiting programme that detected where products were being counterfeited in near-real time, and a customer loyalty programme that mapped purchasing patterns across regions. I later created variants of this architecture at other firms for automated batch declarations, warehouse automation, and regulatory compliance.

I designed the Tatmeen system for the UAE Ministry of Health: responding to the RFP, designing the solution architecture, identifying the technical vendor to build it. National-scale health infrastructure from a blank page.

I co-founded Cloudfeet AG to give mom-and-pop retailers in developing markets the same decision capability as Amazon or Tesco, connecting them directly with manufacturers. I bootstrapped it and ran out of cash. The problem has not gone away.

That is the pattern. I see what is needed before the tools or the market exist for it. I design it, I get it built, and then I move on to the next problem. With ChainAlign, I am breaking the last part of that pattern. I am building it myself this time instead of handing it off. Whether I get to stay with it is not entirely mine to decide.

What I choose to build

An LLM can now do most of what I can do at a keyboard, and do it faster. What it cannot do is tell me whether the result is any good, or what it should have been instead. That part is taste, and taste does not arrive with the tools. It has to be trained.

So the three things I am building are all infrastructure for judgement, at different scales.

ChainAlign is designed to instrument it for an organisation: what was known, what was assumed, what was chosen, kept as a record that compounds across planning cycles.

Preclari is the check I kept running by hand, moved to where it belongs. In front of any workflow that needs a regulatory check before it proceeds, AI-assisted or not.

Open Museum I built for myself first. Many of the essays here are paired with a real artwork, and the schema will not let me choose one as decoration: I have to write what the work is, why it argues what the essay argues, and what to look at in it. Choosing badly is visible. Those decisions taught me more about judgement than any framework has, and I wrote about how the machinery came about in The Companion You Earn. The museum is that forcing function opened up, so anyone can search the world’s open-access collections and see each work whole.

Business readers have told me they cannot see the connection between the painting and the argument. They are not wrong. A generated image would communicate the idea better. I keep the real work because communication is not the job I am hiring it for, which is the argument in AI Everywhere in the Building, Never on the Wall.

From PowerPoint to production

For 15 years, I was the person who designed systems and wrote the specifications that other teams built. Solution architecture, functional specs, technical specs, orchestrating the build, verifying through testing. At companies where decisions move real money: Pfizer, AstraZeneca, BASF, Gilead, Syngenta, Novo Nordisk, UAE Ministry of Health. Compliance infrastructure supporting pharmaceutical sales across 15+ markets. Serialisation architectures tracing products from manufacturing line to patient.

It was one role, which most organisations split across five people and a consulting firm. Alongside the teams doing the work, and accountable for the outcome.

AI-enabled development means I can now build what I architect. ChainAlign is 55,000+ lines of production code that I wrote and that a team will build on.

ChainAlign

In 2025, I founded ChainAlign: a decision intelligence platform for enterprises.

Enterprises have data. They still cannot decide. The problem is the last mile from analysis to aligned action. Decisions collapse back to Excel because nothing has properly replaced it for the messy, political, multi-stakeholder work of getting a leadership team to commit.

ChainAlign is designed to instrument that process, making the structure of decisions visible and traceable over time. The aim is a system that builds organisational judgement as a compounding asset.

My writing explores this territory: why AI copilots produce articulate mediocrity, how planning becomes theatre when deviation has no consequences, and what decision infrastructure actually requires.

I co-founded a charity that builds and runs schools for underprivileged children in India. My niece was eating ice cream outside a restaurant. A man was begging with his daughter the same age. That was 1997. The image stayed. In 2002, I started the charity with friends. It operates on systemic design principles and is built to keep running for years.

Based in Basel, Switzerland. Five languages across three language families. 15+ countries, staying in each long enough to understand how decisions are actually made there. Writing about how decisions get made at pramod.ch/essays.

contact@pramod.ch · LinkedIn