How AI presentation tools help maintain brand consistency and compliance

Many AI tools can generate slides in minutes that look professional and brand-compliant at first glance.

Upon closer review, however, the cracks start to show. Different fonts. Colors that are just a little bit off. Layouts that don’t quite match other slides. Headlines that jump around from slide to slide. With multiple people working on the same deck, the issues get even worse.

A client-facing presentation that doesn’t maintain brand consistency looks unfinished and creates a negative impression, even when the slide content is otherwise strong.

This article shows you how to use AI presentation tools to create on-brand slides every time.

Why AI-generated presentations go off-brand

If you’ve ever created slides with AI presentation tools, you may have noticed brand inconsistencies, big and small, no matter what prompts you used.

AI presentation tools are probabilistic by nature and won’t always produce the same result from the same prompt. Even when you specify your brand guidelines, the generated slides may vary.

Another issue is that reference assets in your presentation might not be considered by the AI. If your AI presentation tool overlooks your templates, style files, and other slides, each new slide will be off-brand.

Automate slide formatting and branding with AI

Having access to approved corporate PowerPoint templates is just the first step. The AI presentation tool you use must follow those templates when generating slides. Templates standardize a presentation's fonts, colors, layouts, and other design elements. They are the foundation for brand-compliant presentations.

Template-based slide generation is more reliable than prompting AI with formatting instructions in detail. AI that builds off the templates is an enormous time-saver that prevents the need to re-prompt or create lengthy prompts.

Similarly, your AI presentation tool should draw upon not only the underlying templates, but the rest of the presentation. If you already have a dozen perfect slides, the thirteenth slide you prompted for should use the previous slides as a basis. Otherwise, you’re stuck with redesigning the output.   

How thinkcell helps: Your organization just released the latest corporate template. Now, as you use AI to draft some slides for a client-facing deck, you don’t want to waste time dealing with branding inconsistencies.

With thinkcell AI Suite, your presentation’s slide master and existing slides serve as the basis for any new slides by default. Existing layouts and shapes are used in new slides to ensure further compliance. Creating new slides will be brand compliant, but so will remaking the old slides in the new template with AI. You can spend less time fixing slide formatting and more time refining the story behind your data.

Build slides based on best practices

With AI tools being probabilistic, you never quite know what the output will be. If prompting for a certain type of slide, such as a process flow, a comparison table, or a matrix, the result will be different each time regardless of the prompt.

That creates a challenge in maintaining consistency, and that’s especially so if there are already widely used individual slides within your organization that just need to be customized for your presentation.

To prevent inconsistency, use an AI presentation tool that can easily build off those existing slides rather than reinventing them.

How thinkcell helps: Your presentation needs an org chart to represent the project’s stakeholders. You know who to feature on the slide and where to place them, but you just aren’t sure what the slide should look like.

With thinkcell AI Suite, you can generate customized slides based on 450+ professionally-created slide templates and elements. With these templates covering all common business presentation scenarios, you can quickly generate consistent slides for every situation. 

Maintain brand consistency when editing AI-generated presentations

AI-generated slides need to remain fully editable. Otherwise, even small changes to charts, text, or layouts can become unnecessarily time-consuming.

Similarly, using AI for editing can lead to brand consistency issues if your prompt ends up regenerating the entire slide instead of simply editing what you specified. When a slide is regenerated with AI, there’s a chance of introducing new inconsistencies.

How thinkcell helps: A colleague has reviewed your client presentation and requested changes to a chart and several text sections.

With thinkcell AI Suite’s fully editable outputs, making these changes is easy. The presentation is already brand-compliant, with thinkcell’s AI capabilities having meticulously followed the template. Now, any future edits maintain that consistency. The edits refine the slide content instead of rebuilding it completely, saving time and ensuring brand compliance.

Instead of editing by hand, you decide to prompt for the needed visual changes – including adding CAGR arrows and changing the color of some text boxes. AI-powered text changes, including rewriting, shortening, and applying parallel phrasing, all maintain formatting.

Brand consistency checks with AI

To ensure brand consistency and compliance in AI-generated presentations, it’s helpful to review the following elements.

• Fonts, colors, and layouts.
• Logos, imagery, and visual assets.
• Chart styles and formatting.
• Tone of voice and terminology.
• Accuracy and editability.

Final approval of a presentation remains a human responsibility, but some AI tools can help check your slides and flag any issues.

How thinkcell helps: With your presentation just about finished, you need a final sense-check to ensure brand consistency and compliance. With thinkcell AI Suite, you can ask it to check for inconsistencies, such as mixed font sizes, inconsistent number formatting, colors not in your theme, misaligned shapes, or uneven spacing.

Any issues flagged by the AI can either be changed automatically or left as is with an on-slide comment pointing out the problem for you to review. With this check, your presentation is now ready to be shared.

Creating on-brand corporate presentations with AI

AI promises to reduce manual work. However, that only happens when the AI doesn’t require formatting corrections on every slide generated.

To ensure brand consistency, check whether your AI presentation tool uses your existing templates, preserves PowerPoint editability, and can identify formatting inconsistencies before a deck is shared.

FAQ

Commonly asked questions about brand compliance.