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Internal comms leads: what would you do with your time if you could type "create me an intranet" into a chat box and two minutes later, you've got pages, navigation, branded media, news articles and an events hub? That's the promise of Unily's new employee experience agent, Indi. The London-based intranet vendor released Indi on June 15, following a customer pilot that included Johnson & Johnson.
During a live demonstration at Unleash Las Vegas in March, I got a taste of how Indi works and the company's thinking behind the product. Unily senior director of product marketing, Matthew Boyd, built an intranet from scratch for a name-brand clothing retailer as I watched. Indi pulled the branding from the public website. The images were placeholders, but in a live deployment they'd come from the client's own assets.
The whole thing was built based on a single, albeit detailed, prompt. The result was a polished-looking intranet. Not necessarily a finished project — Boyd followed up with requests for video content and modifications to the banner — but it shaved months off of a normal intranet deployment.
Table of Contents
- AI Is Built In, Not Bolted On
- What Internal Comms Are Supposed to Do Instead
- One Source, Many Formats
- Unanswered Questions
- The Wider Bet
AI Is Built In, Not Bolted On
When asked to compare Indi to competitor's AI plays, Boyd thinks the difference is clear.
"Everyone is AI-native this, AI-native that," he told Reworked. "We actually truly believe we are, because in order to bring Indi into the Unily world, we've spent significant time re-architecting … making space and building Indi into the core of Unily, not as just another AI plugin."
The argument is that most competitors have grafted AI features onto existing publishing systems — a writing assistant here, a chatbot there. Building an agent capable of producing a full intranet in two minutes, Boyd said, requires AI at the foundation. He said Indi was built on the 20 years of employee experience knowledge the company has acquired since its founding.
Under the hood, Indi is an orchestrator that delegates work to specialized agents: a media agent that generates branded images and video, an information architecture agent that plans site structure, a design agent that lays out pages, a communications agent that writes copy. The user only ever interacts with Indi, while the rest remains hidden.
The system runs on a framework Unily calls OPAR: observe, plan, act, reflect. Indi first reviews existing content to avoid creating duplicates (no second marketing site because someone didn't know the first one existed). It then presents a plan to the user, who has to approve it before the tool takes any steps. Once approved, Indi moves forward with the plan, then runs a quality check against the original request. If the output falls short, the loop starts over.
That last step, Boyd said, is meant to address the dreaded AI slop problem. Whether it actually does this is something customers will have to judge in production.
During the March demo, Indi built the intranet based on a public website. In practice, Indi would be building based on information within a company's systems, on the company's branding guidelines and imagery, policy documents and internal comms templates, access to the HRIS and calendars, etc. The system creates a full audit trail to identify the steps and decisions taken along the way and a detailed site structure on the back end. Nothing publishes without an admin's approval.
What Internal Comms Are Supposed to Do Instead
Indi is supposed to free time up for internal comms professionals. The question is, what do they do with that time?
Boyd noted that CEOs viewed comms as strategic advisors during the pandemic, but now they don't have the time or resources to focus on the laundry list of strategic work that elevates their role.
"In COVID, they were the right hand of the CEO," Boyd said. "Now the workload is so high, and they're not getting any extra budget or resources, and 'do more with less' is the prevailing narrative. So the CEO who's getting communications training from the comms team in six months says, 'Let's just not invite them to this meeting. They're not helping me get these messages out — just give them the copy.'"
Boyd sees Indi as a way to return communicators to that strategic role, but if the product lives up to the speed and accuracy he claims, it does raise the question of if companies will resist the gravitational pull of reducing already small comms teams.
One Source, Many Formats
Underlying all of this is what Boyd called the Content Studio.
Content Studio aims to solve the content governance problems that are common for many comms teams. Today, if a CEO wants to announce a benefits change, comms might produce a written article, a recorded video and a podcast episode to spread the message. Each format is a separate object in the system, meaning each has to be updated, archived or corrected separately. Unily's larger clients sometimes have more than a million such content objects sitting around, with no easy way to find — let alone fix — the outdated ones.
With Content Studio, those formats are treated as offshoots of one underlying source. Drop in a document, a SharePoint file or other source material, and Indi generates the email, the video, the podcast, an infographic, a five-bullet summary. Change the source and everything updates. Archive it, and everything tied to it goes too — except, of course, anything already sent to inboxes.
Boyd calls this "engagement styles" — letting employees choose how they consume information. The runner gets the podcast on her morning run. The skimmer gets the bullet summary. The visual learner gets the infographic.
Boyd demonstrated the feature using a real Johnson & Johnson example: a new cardiovascular device that uses ultrasonic waves to break down arterial buildup. From one source document, Indi generated an explainer video, a podcast and a number of written formats. David Lee, senior product owner at Johnson & Johnson had this to say in the launch announcement: "Experiences that used to take days to brief, design and publish can now be live in minutes; bringing speed and consistency at enterprise scale."
Unanswered Questions
Clients don't have access to the underlying model for fine-tuning; that stays under Unily's control. They can however train their version of Indi on brand identity, tone of voice and source documents. Boyd framed this as a guardrail: clients can't push Indi to produce off-brand content at odds with company guidelines.
Pricing was unresolved at the time of the demo in March. A question about pricing hadn't been answered at the time of publication. As of March, Unily had hired a specialist team to work it out. Boyd raised the possibility of outcome-based pricing — clients only pay if Unily hits agreed productivity or deflection targets — but said no decisions had been made. It's an industry-wide question of whether software vendors will move from seat-based to consumption-based to outcome-based pricing, not exclusive to Unily.
The Wider Bet
Indi follows Unily Glass, the conversational layer the company launched in March, that lets employees act on tools like Salesforce, Workday and Microsoft 365 from a single interface in the intranet. Glass targets the employee experience. Indi targets the admin experience: the comms managers, HR teams and intranet owners doing the publishing.
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It's all part of a bigger push for the intranet to become the "front door" of work, even as conversational interfaces and AI assistants reshape how employees retrieve information and move between systems. Boyd's argument is that the intranet provides an experience layer on top of whatever apps a company picks — and that being vendor-agnostic matters more, not less, as Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce and others jockey to be the dominant agent host.
"You avoid mega-vendor lock-in," Boyd said. "Do you want to run Microsoft for absolutely everything? That poses a risk to IT teams … what if they decide to switch?"
Providing a simplified interface to the dozens of apps and now agents employees interact with daily sounds appealing, but it's a promise that's been made before without success. Time will tell if Unily succeeds in making the case.
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