Lokdeep Singh, CEO of Unily – Interview Series

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Lokdeep Singh has more than 20 years’ experience leading high-growth enterprise software companies. Most recently, as Senior Advisor at Providence Equity Partners, where he supported portfolio companies on AI strategy, operational excellence, and go-to-market acceleration. Prior to that he was CEO of Talkwalker, a global leader in enterprise consumer intelligence, where he led the transformation to achieve sustainable, profitable growth; and at Synchronoss Technologies as General Manager.

Unily is an enterprise employee experience platform designed to help large organizations connect employees, streamline internal communications, and bring workplace tools, knowledge, and services into a unified digital environment. Founded in 2006, the company serves global enterprises with distributed, desk-based, and frontline workforces, combining intranet capabilities, employee communications, search, analytics, integrations, and personalization within a single platform.

Unily increasingly positions its technology as AI-native, using governed artificial intelligence to automate content management, surface relevant information, personalize employee experiences, and enable workers to interact with connected enterprise applications through conversational interfaces. The platform integrates with widely used workplace systems such as Microsoft 365 and Teams and is built for organizations with complex technology environments, regulatory requirements, and large multilingual workforces.

You began your career deep in telecom engineering and network infrastructure before moving into CTO, product, general management, and CEO roles, eventually leading Talkwalker through a successful exit and now taking the helm at Unily. How has that progression shaped your view of what it actually takes for employees to trust and adopt a transformative technology like AI?

My career has given me a perspective that sits between technology and the people expected to use it. Early on, I was focused on infrastructure, making sure systems worked reliably, securely, and at scale. As I moved into product, general management, and ultimately CEO roles, I learned that technical capability is only one part of whether a technology succeeds.

Employees will only adopt an emerging technology when they understand how it affects their work, believe it will help rather than hurt them, and have confidence that it will behave predictably.

The biggest mistake leaders can make is treating AI adoption as a software rollout. You can deploy the best model in the world, but if employees don’t trust the information it provides, don’t understand what it is allowed to do, or don’t know where the boundaries are, adoption will remain superficial. Trust has to be designed into the employee experience from the beginning.

AI capabilities are improving extraordinarily quickly, yet trust inside organizations often seems to be moving much more slowly. What is driving this widening gap between what AI can technically do and what employees are actually comfortable allowing it to do?

The trust gap exists because organizations have invested heavily in making AI capable, but not at the same pace in making it understandable, accountable, and grounded in trusted information.

AI can now reason, generate content, and take action, but many organizations still lack an authoritative system of record for knowledge and content. When employees don’t know where AI is getting its answers, whether information is current, or who owns it, trust erodes quickly.

Closing the gap requires more than better models. It requires strong content governance and a trusted knowledge foundation that ensures AI is working from accurate, secure, and up-to-date information. The organizations that succeed will be the ones that make trust part of the AI experience itself, not an afterthought.

Companies often approach enterprise AI as a technology