If your organization has rolled out Microsoft 365 Copilot, there is a feature in it that belongs to the brand team, whether or not the brand team has heard of it yet. It is called Brand Kit, and it is where Copilot learns what your brand is.
This post explains what a Brand Kit is, what goes into one, who controls it, and — most importantly — the decisions worth making before anyone uploads a file. Details are drawn from Microsoft’s documentation as of September 2026.
What a Brand Kit is
A Brand Kit is a central collection of brand assets inside the Microsoft Copilot app. When an employee selects a brand kit in the Copilot pane in PowerPoint (through the + button and Select brand) and then prompts, Copilot uses that kit’s approved templates, colors, fonts and assets to keep the generated slides aligned with your brand.
According to Microsoft, an official kit can hold:
- logos, including primary, secondary and variations;
- color palettes with specific hex values;
- fonts and typography choices;
- approved imagery, icons and illustrations;
- PowerPoint templates and layout patterns;
- brand voice, tone, terminology and writing guidance;
- photography rules and visual treatment guidelines;
- brand guideline documents, including PDFs, from which Copilot can help extract information.
Kits can also reference your SharePoint Organization Assets Library, so approved images already managed there do not have to be uploaded again.
Official kits and who controls them
There is an important distinction between a brand kit an individual makes for themselves and an official Brand Kit. Official kits are made available to everyone in the tenant through the Organization tab. Your organization can have more than one.
Only brand managers can create, edit, rename and update official kits. Brand managers are designated by IT under the organization’s brand manager policy, and Microsoft notes that after designation it can take up to 24 hours for the permission to take effect.
Microsoft’s support page also lists a Copilot license requirement for this feature. License names have changed several times, so confirm the current requirement with your Microsoft administrator before you plan a rollout around it.
Template settings: the September change
In September 2026, Microsoft added two settings that brand managers control for templates in a Brand Kit:
- Strict brand adherence restricts Copilot to your approved template and slide master layouts. Copilot cannot add or remove placeholders or create new layouts.
- Note instructions let brand managers put plain-language guidance in a template’s speaker notes, such as “Always include this cover slide” or “Keep the text minimal,” which Copilot then follows.
End users cannot override either setting. We explain both in detail in their own posts.
Later the same month, Microsoft began rolling out Brand Skills, which let brand managers upload written instructions as Markdown files to the Brand Kit and publish them across the organization.
Five decisions to make before you upload anything
A Brand Kit is easy to set up. That is exactly why it is worth slowing down. Whatever goes into an official kit becomes, in effect, the definition of your brand for every employee who generates a deck. Here are the decisions we would make first.
1. Who is the brand manager?
Name a person, not a department. The brand manager decides what the organization’s official kit contains and how strictly Copilot follows the template. If nobody is named, IT tends to become the de facto owner, and IT is rarely the right owner for brand decisions. It’s worth naming at least two brand managers, so the role survives a vacation or a resignation.
2. One kit or several?
Multiple official kits are supported. That is useful for organizations with genuinely distinct sub-brands or business units. It is a trap for organizations that simply have drifted into several template versions. Before creating a second kit, ask whether you are describing two brands or failing to decide on one.
3. Is the template ready to be taught from?
This is the decision that’s easiest to skip. They upload the current corporate template because it is the one they have. But Copilot learns from a template’s sample slides, placeholders and theme, and falls back to the Slide Master when the examples are missing. A template that works well for a careful designer can teach a model very little. Uploading it to an official kit turns its weaknesses into policy.
4. What should the voice guidance say?
Brand Kit can hold voice and tone guidance, and Brand Skills can hold detailed written rules. Resist the urge to paste the whole brand book in. A model follows short, specific, testable instructions better than long aspirational ones. “Use sentence case in titles” is followable. “Our voice is bold yet approachable” is not, at least not consistently.
5. How will you know it is working?
Before publishing, run a fixed set of realistic prompts against the kit and look at what comes out. Keep that set, and rerun it whenever the kit, the template or Microsoft’s product changes. Without a baseline, you will only discover drift when someone forwards a deck that should never have been sent.
What Brand Kit does not do
It is worth being clear about the limits.
- It does not design your examples. Brand Kit stores and applies your assets. It does not create the finished sample slides Copilot learns from.
- It does not fix the template. If colors are hardcoded or layouts use text boxes instead of placeholders, the kit carries those problems to every user.
- It does not remove the need for review. Microsoft’s own guidance is that Copilot output should be reviewed by a person. A good kit reduces what has to be fixed. It does not make generated decks self-approving.
Where to start
If you are a brand manager looking at Brand Kit for the first time, the order that works is: name the owners, decide how many kits you need, get the template into a state a model can learn from, write short rules, test against real prompts, then publish. In that order, the kit becomes the most useful brand governance tool you have. Out of order, it becomes the fastest way to distribute a weak template to everyone at once.
Key takeaways
- A Brand Kit is where Copilot learns your brand: logos, colors, fonts, imagery, templates, voice and guidelines.
- Official kits are shared tenant-wide, and only designated brand managers can create or edit them.
- Brand managers now control strict brand adherence, note instructions and Brand Skills.
- The template you upload matters more than any other asset in the kit. Get it right before you publish.
Setting up a Brand Kit? Have your template scored before it becomes the official one.
Related reading
Sources
- Microsoft Support, Create and manage official Brand kits in the Microsoft Copilot app (July 2026)
- Microsoft Support, Keep your presentation on-brand with Copilot (July 2026)
- Microsoft Support, Manage template settings in your Brand Kit for Copilot in PowerPoint (August 2026)
- Microsoft 365 Message Center, MC1473166 — Brand Skill support (16 Sep 2026)