"Her recent work has received fantastic feedback, with templates including guidance on using AI, something we're actively encouraging our staff to use."

Your team is already drafting with AI. Some of them use Copilot inside Word. Others write in ChatGPT or Claude and paste the result in. It does not matter which, what matters is the document they go into.

Text pasted in from a browser arrives carrying its own formatting: a different font, a different size, colours and spacing that have nothing to do with your brand. In a well-built template it drops into the right style and looks like it belongs. In a poorly built one, someone spends twenty minutes putting it right, and does it again tomorrow.

Pasted text losing its formatting is the most common problem we see, and it happens no matter which AI tool your team uses. The tool is not what decides how the words look. The template is. 

If your team uses Copilot, Microsoft's own guidance says where on-brand output comes from. Your template is, in Microsoft's words, "the foundation Copilot learns from".

A Brand Kit does not replace it, which is worth saying because people often assume it does. Microsoft's instructions for building one tell you to upload your templates into it, documents as well as presentations, then send you to their guidance on setting those templates up properly. The Brand Kit carries your logos, colours, fonts and voice. Your template carries the structure underneath. One sits on top of the other.

And plenty of teams do not have a Brand Kit at all, since setting one up needs a particular Microsoft licence and someone appointed to manage it. Without one, your template is the only thing carrying your brand.

Sound structure gives the AI something reliable to follow. No structure means it has nothing.

The requirements are structural, not decorative:

• Theme colours and fonts set in the Slide Master, not styling applied by hand, slide by slide
• Real placeholders, not floating text boxes
• Enough layouts to cover what people actually produce
• No overlapping elements, and nothing decorative sitting on top of text or images
• In PowerPoint, sample slides showing the kinds of slides people actually make, not just empty layouts
• In Word, real heading styles doing real structural work, so pasted text has a correct style to take

A template that has not been built correctly has none of this underneath. It looks good but it does not survive being used.

Every template we build is made this way, whether your team uses AI today or not. However your team drafts, the template is the only thing that makes your documents match.

The same structure that keeps an AI draft on brand keeps a new starter's document on brand. The template does the remembering, so nobody has to.