How to Make Copilot Build On-Brand Presentations: Brand Kit, Strict Mode and Note Instructions

Ask anyone who has used Copilot in PowerPoint what annoys them most and you will hear the same answer. The content is fine. The deck looks nothing like the firm's. New layouts appear from nowhere, the logo moves, the fonts drift and someone spends an hour putting it all back.

Microsoft has spent 2026 fixing that, and September brought the most useful changes yet. Firms can now lock Copilot to their approved layouts, write standing instructions into their templates and publish approved presentation skills across the organisation. None of it works until someone sets it up, which is why most firms have not noticed.

Key takeaways

• Brand Kit is the foundation. It holds your approved templates, colours, fonts and assets, and Copilot uses it when building presentations.
• Strict brand adherence restricts Copilot to your approved template and slide master layouts, with no invented layouts and no added or removed placeholders.
• Note instructions let you write rules into a template's speaker notes, such as "always include this cover slide", which Copilot follows every time.
• Only Brand Kit owners and brand managers can change these settings, and users cannot override them.
• Skills can now be published through Brand Kit too, so decks follow approved structure and content guidance, not just approved styling.

Start with the template, not the settings

Every setting below depends on a well-built template, and most firm templates are not. Before you touch Brand Kit, open your PowerPoint template and check:

• Branding lives in the slide master, theme colours and theme fonts, not in text boxes someone formatted by hand.
• Layouts are properly named, such as Cover, Section divider, Two column and Closing.
• Content sits in real placeholders rather than floating text boxes.
• The template includes representative sample slides for the cover, section dividers, main content types and closing slide.

An hour spent here pays back on every deck Copilot builds afterwards. A messy template with strict mode switched on just produces messy decks more consistently.

Brand Kit and brand managers

Brand Kit is where approved templates and brand assets live in Microsoft 365. To publish an official kit for the whole firm, your Office apps admin sets up the Enterprise Brand Manager policy and adds a security group containing your brand managers. Those people can then publish kits that everyone else can use but not edit.

In a smaller firm the brand manager might be the marketing lead or the practice manager. Pick someone deliberately, because they control how every Copilot-built deck in the firm will look.

Strict brand adherence

Strict brand adherence, sometimes called strict mode, is set for the whole Brand Kit. When it is on, Copilot uses only your approved template and slide master layouts. It will not invent new layouts or add or remove placeholders.

To switch it on, open Manage Brand Kits, expand Templates and turn on Strict brand adherence. The change saves automatically and applies whenever that Brand Kit is chosen, whether from the template picker or in the Copilot pane.

Use it where consistency matters more than creative flexibility: client pitches, board packs, regulated material and anything with the firm's name on it going out of the door. For internal brainstorming decks you may prefer to leave Copilot some freedom, and you can run a separate, looser kit for that.

Note instructions

Note instructions, also called notes steering, let you write plain-language rules into the speaker notes of your template slides. Copilot reads them each time it builds a presentation from that template, so your people stop having to repeat the same requests in every prompt.

Examples that work well:

• "Always include this cover slide."
• "Do not modify this slide." (for disclaimers and legal wording)
• "Keep the text on this slide minimal."
• "This slide must always come last."
• "Write for a non-technical client audience."

Note instructions and strict mode work independently or together. Strict mode controls the layouts. Note instructions control what goes in them.

Skills: the next layer

Brand Kit now also has a Skills section, rolling out through late September. A skill is a set of instructions that tells Copilot how to build a particular kind of presentation, for example a pitch deck structure or how a client review should flow. Brand managers can upload a skill or create one directly in Brand Kit, then publish it for everyone using Copilot in PowerPoint.

There are now three routes for skills in PowerPoint: personal skills stored in OneDrive, organisation skills uploaded by admins in the Microsoft 365 admin centre and brand-governed skills in Brand Kit. Microsoft has also started shipping its own ready-made presentation skills. Treat published skills like any other firm standard: someone should own, review and retire them, and they should go through the same checks as the rest of your brand material.

What your people need to do

Very little, which is the point. Once the kit is set up, users choose the firm's Brand Kit when they create a presentation with Copilot, and the rules apply automatically. The training job is making sure they know the kit exists and that they select it. A setting nobody chooses delivers nothing.

It also helps to show people how to prompt for a good first draft: give Copilot the source document, the audience and the purpose, and let the template handle the look. Our guide to common Copilot mistakes covers the prompting habits that make the biggest difference, and for teams producing a lot of decks, how marketing teams are using AI shows where this fits in a wider workflow.

A sensible rollout

1. Tidy the master template first.
2. Nominate brand managers and ask your admin to set up the brand manager policy.
3. Publish the kit, with strict mode on for client-facing templates.
4. Add note instructions to the handful of slides that must never change.
5. Test with three or four real decks before telling everyone.
6. Show your teams how to select the kit. Ten minutes in a team meeting is enough.

The honest summary

Copilot has been capable of producing good presentation content for a while. What held it back in professional services was that the output did not look like the firm. Strict mode and note instructions largely fix that, but only for firms that set them up. The work is mostly in the template, and it is a one-off.

At IQIT we help UK firms get real value from Copilot, from hands-on training to getting templates and Brand Kit set up so every deck comes out on brand. If your Copilot decks still need rebuilding by hand, get in touch.