Staying true to your brand with AI: Building an AI-ready brand as customer zero

One of the first things we had to get our heads around was that not every AI-generated output carries the same level of brand risk. If I am using Copilot to help me organise some rough notes that are going to sit in my OneDrive, I am probably not going to lose sleep over whether every sentence sounds perfectly Engage Squared. But if that same content is going to be externally facing, the conversation is quite different.

So rather than trying to put the same rules around everything, we started looking at AI-generated work through a simple risk lens. Internal drafts and experimentation sit at the lower end. Customer-facing work needs more care. And final deliverables, public content, agents and digital experiences carry the highest risk because they become part of someone’s lasting experience of your brand.

For us, that was a very important distinction. We are an AI consultancy, so the last thing we want is for people to feel nervous about experimenting. But we also need to be realistic about the point where an AI-generated output stops being “something I am working on” and starts representing Engage Squared.

And that is really the question I would encourage marketing and design teams to ask first.. where does AI-generated content start to represent your brand?

Once you know that, it becomes much easier to decide what level of review is needed, when an approved template should be used, when Marketing or Design should be involved, and where people can simply get on with experimenting.

This was probably one of the more entertaining parts of the process, because it exposed how differently humans and AI can interpret the exact same guidance. Our traditional brand guidelines are great, but they were written for people to interpret. One of our tone-of-voice references talks about sounding like you are chatting to someone over coffee and a warm choccy croissant. Of course, to a human who can analyse more context, that means we communicate warm, conversational and relaxed.

Copilot once took that rather literally and added a line to an email along the lines of, “Hope you’re enjoying a warm choccy croissant somewhere.”

It had interpreted this brand guidance, in the most literal way and quite obviously not how we intended. That was a good reminder that a brand guide written for people is not automatically a brand guide that an LLM can interpret well. So we started translating the intent behind our brand into much more explicit AI-friendly instructions. For us, that means spelling out things like how we write, what we avoid, how formal we are, how we structure content, and of course what we do not want.

We have turned that guidance into a Brand Skill that AI tools can actually use, rather than expecting them to infer the brand from a PDF written for humans.

Of course, a human is still needed to create the content we love. But giving AI clearer guidance means the first draft is much more likely to sound like us, which gives our people a much stronger starting point and a lot less to undo afterwards.

The guidance I would give here is pretty simple: do not assume your existing brand guidelines are enough for AI. Look at where they rely on metaphor, interpretation or unwritten context, and translate those ideas into clearer instructions, examples and boundaries.

One of the biggest things we changed was our PowerPoint template. Our old template worked really well for people. You opened it, picked a layout and, because you already understood the brand, you knew what looked right, what needed adjusting and what absolutely did not belong there. The problem is that Copilot and Cowork do not bring that same instinct with them.

So instead of throwing everything out and starting again, our design team adapted the template around the way these tools actually work. We looked closely at the structure, layouts, placeholders, hierarchy, fonts, colours and accessibility, and made sure the template was doing more of the heavy lifting from the beginning. We also spent a lot of time testing different combinations of templates, brand guidance and skills to see what gave us the strongest result without making the experience too restrictive.

That testing was useful because it reminded us that a template can be perfectly good for a person and still not give AI enough to work with. If you have ever generated a deck in five minutes and then spent the next hour fixing the layouts, changing fonts, moving things around and trying to make it feel remotely like your brand, you will know exactly what I mean.

What we have ended up with is a much stronger starting point. The brand is still the brand, but the way it is structured makes it easier for Copilot and Cowork to work within it rather than inventing around the edges.

The final piece for us was less about the technology, and more about enabling the people using it. We want our teams pushing these tools, experimenting with what they can do and finding better ways to create and work. That is a huge part of being customer zero, and our ethos as people friendly technology. But with that freedom, people also need to know where the boundaries are and what “good” looks like when they are creating something with AI that represents Engage Squared.

So we developed a set of AI Brand Guidelines that sit alongside our broader brand guidance. They cover the expectations around using approved source material, checking facts and claims, giving AI enough context, using the right templates and brand resources, and reviewing both the written and visual output before anything is shared. We also make it clear where Marketing or Design should be involved, particularly for higher-profile, public-facing or higher-risk work.

For us, the aim was never to slow people down or make everything come back through Marketing. Quite the opposite. We want people to feel confident pushing AI as far as they can, while also knowing, okay, this is what I should use, this is what I need to check, and this is when I should pull someone else in.