Copilot Brand Kits: The Future of Brand Consistency

One of the most common requests we have heard, since Copilot appeared on the scene, is how clients can ensure that generated content adheres to their corporate brand. This holds true especially when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, which are some of the most highly branded assets within an organization.

Copilot Brand Kits

To deal with this issue, Microsoft is deploying something called Brand Kits. Similar to the corporate, SharePoint Brand Center, brand kits define logos, color schemes, and fonts in a single location. However, a brand kit’s purpose is specifically to be a source that AI can reference when creating content, like prompt instructions. Not only can you include assets like colors and font libraries, but you can also include the “voice” you want to use (e.g. “friendly but professional”), your visual style, and brand guidelines. You can also leverage your existing organizational asset libraries if you have already set those up. This brand kit will be used by PowerPoint and likely other applications in the future to ensure generated content adheres to your brand.

Configuring a Brand Kit

Any user with a Copilot Premium license can create their own brand kit. To do this, navigate to the Copilot app and click on the App Launcher squares. Choose “Create”.

Next, choose the “more” option and then “Brand kits.

From here you can create a new brand kit, supplying all the information you need to create your brand. This includes:

  • Logos
  • Templates
  • Fonts
  • Colors
  • Images
  • Icons
  • Brand Voice
  • Style

Note that many of these items aren’t just asking for a single color palette or a file or two. Instead, they will allow for the definition of more detailed information, both graphically and written. For instance, the color scheme can include which colors should be used for text, foreground, background, accents and charts.

“Style” can include guidelines about the kind of photography to use, how to use screen  captures, and what to do with graphics. The brand kit uses AI to convert your visual assets into written prompt instructions it can use when building assets for you going forward.

If you already have a brand guidelines PDF, you can even upload the PDF and the brand kit will automatically populate each of these sections with the information it finds in the document.

Learn more at Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

Publishing Brand Kits to Others

Much like OneDrive content or Copilot notebooks, brand kits are generally created by individual users and they can be shared with other users using the common sharing dialog.

However, it’s also possible to create one or more organizational-level brand kits. To set this up, you must first designate a group of users as brand managers within your organization. Start by creating a mail-enabled security group, and then apply the Enterprise Brand Manager policy to the users in that group. It could take up to 24 hours for this setting to take effect. After that, brand managers will be able to publish their brand kits organization-wide. Learn how to set this up at Enterprise brand manager policy setup.

How to Use Brand Kits

Once you have created your brand kit, you can use it in the “Create” experience of your Copilot app to create images, banners and posters that adhere to your brand.

Learn more here: Create branded images, banners, and posters in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.

To use a brand kit when creating a PowerPoint presentation, you can add the brand kit as a reference in your prompt.

Copilot will use the organization’s template, colors, and fonts to generate content, as shown here in an example where it was asked to create a presentation based on this article using the brand kit.

When working with PowerPoint, it’s important to understand that brand kits are just one element that helps make a great Copilot-generated presentation that adheres to your brand standards. In addition to the brand kit, Copilot in PowerPoint will take into account template aspects such as slide layout options, object placement within the slides, and even text density.

Take a look at Microsoft’s great break-down of how Copilot constructs PowerPoint slides and how you can help it learn your organization’s brand: Keep your presentation on-brand with Copilot.

Rethinking Branding in the Age of AI

There are some larger issues at play for corporate brand managers that must be considered.

  • The way to enforce brand conformity in the past was to create a template file and ask everyone to use that template. However, this level of control is fundamentally mismatched with AI’s ability to create content randomly. Organizations must ask themselves how they feel about releasing this level of control and allowing AI to drive content based on guidelines and not rules.
  • When it comes to actual brand assets, like logos, AI-created images may use unsanctioned or old versions of logos. However, if a user creates a presentation and it uses an incorrect AI-generated graphic, what happens when that becomes part of the corpus of internal presentations? What happens if other people take that deck and copy it and start using it as the basis for their deck? Organizations need to create user policies that guide their users as to when AI-generated images or OK and when they are not.

Conclusion

Brand kits are an important step toward helping organizations bring consistency to AI-generated content, but they are not a magic button that replaces thoughtful brand governance. They give Copilot better instructions, better assets, and a clearer sense of what “on brand” means for your organization. The real opportunity is to pair those technical capabilities with clear user guidance, well-maintained brand assets, and realistic expectations about what AI can and cannot control. As more Microsoft 365 experiences begin to use brand kits, organizations that invest in this foundation now will be in a much better position to scale branded content creation with confidence.