Mahek Pandey is not a software engineer. She has no computer science degree. Until two years ago, she had never written a line of code in her life.
India’s public relations industry is projected to cross ₹2,800 crore this year. Yet the professionals driving this growth still lack the basic analytical infrastructure that marketing, advertising, and digital teams have relied on for over a decade.
Mehak Pandey, a comms professional with a decade's experience, has developed the NexusAI platform to combine real-time multilingual media monitoring, AI sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarking, campaign ROI calculation, predictive risk modelling, and journalist intelligence for the Indian market.
The unlikely builder
What makes NexusAI's story unusual is not just the platform itself, it's who built it. Pandey represents a growing wave of non-STEM professionals who are using accessible AI and data science education to solve domain-specific problems that technologists often overlook. She had no background in programming, machine learning, or software development. She learned Python, NLP, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow over 12 months while working full-time.
"The best AI products aren't always built by the best engineers," says Pandey. "They're built by people who understand the problem deeply enough to know what the solution should look like. I spent 10 years understanding what PR professionals need. The Data Science programme gave me the tools to build it."
Can PR prove its own value?
Per Pandey, "PR consistently delivers 10–15x better trust-per-rupee than paid advertising, but the industry has never had standardised tools to quantify this. While marketing teams walk into boardrooms with attribution dashboards and conversion funnels, PR teams present clipping books and subjective sentiment summaries. This credibility gap costs the industry budget share, board-level influence, and talent."
How to measure PR impact for regional media in India?
Over 600 million Indian internet users consume content in regional languages. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali media coverage of a brand can tell a completely different sentiment story than English. Major global monitoring platform do not allocate resources to this slice of the audience, leaving PR teams blind to how their brands are perceived by the majority of India’s population.
NexusAI is therefore available in nine Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, and English, all analysed with identical analytical depth.
Nexus AI will also scan for early crisis warning, journalist intelligence and GEO keyword directives.
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