How Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) Accelerates Business Growth?

Data science as a service (DSaaS) gives organisations access to data expertise, tooling and models without building a data science team from scratch. For communications, research and intelligence teams, most of that data is text: news articles, social posts, commentary and reports.

The questions those teams ask tend to repeat. Who is covering us? What is being said, and in which language? Which narratives are gaining ground, and who is pushing them? When the same questions come back every week, a series of one-off data projects becomes slow and expensive. That is where DSaaS evolves into intelligence products such as Pingrid and Annex.

Why media and narrative data needs a service model

Getting value from large volumes of text requires three things: knowing which questions to ask, having the tools to collect and process the data, and having the models to reveal the right patterns. Few organisations have all three in-house.

Collection alone gives little insight. Thousands of articles and posts only become useful once they are connected to who wrote them, where they were published, which beat or topic they belong to and how they relate to other stories. That structuring work is exactly what DSaaS providers specialise in.

The question facing every organisation today, whether a newsroom, an agency, an NGO or a corporate communications team, is how to use this information effectively - not just their own data, but all the relevant public coverage and discourse around them.

From one-off projects to always-on intelligence

Data science differs from traditional statistics because it covers the whole chain: gathering data, processing it into a tractable form, making it tell its story and presenting that story to decision-makers.

For recurring media and narrative questions, rebuilding that chain for every project is wasteful. A managed product keeps the pipeline running continuously, so analysts spend their time interpreting results rather than preparing data. Identrics packages this expertise into two products.

Media questions: Pingrid

Pingrid maintains a dynamic media graph that connects articles to their authors, outlets and beats. Instead of commissioning a new analysis every time, teams can see who writes about what, how coverage shifts over time and how stories move between languages. Our UAE media landscape snapshot shows the kind of view this makes possible.

Narrative questions: Annex

Annex addresses the next layer: what is being said and by whom. It clusters large volumes of scattered content into topics and narratives, lets analysts annotate and refine them, and maps the networks of actors behind them. This is the work many organisations previously bought as bespoke research projects.

Choosing the right intelligence partner

To get the most out of a data science partner, look for depth in your data type rather than breadth across every industry. For media and narrative work, that means strong multilingual text processing, entity and author resolution, and analyst-friendly outputs.

At Identrics, our expertise covers text classification, understanding, analysis and generation. Rather than piecemeal outputs, we build pipelines that deliver a complete picture with insights already extracted, and the same models power Pingrid and Annex. Where a question falls outside the products, our team still offers custom research on demand.

DSaaS gives organisations a data-driven advantage without the cost of building large teams and infrastructure. Intelligence products take that one step further by making the advantage continuous.

See it in practice

Our case studies show how clients have applied these capabilities in media monitoring, PR and information integrity work.