Are you in charge of deploying Copilot to your content creators in PowerPoint? If so, you’ve finally landed in the right place. This troubleshooting hub will be your new best friend. From figuring out why your results are inconsistent, to estimating the actual time your organisation could save, we’ve got answers and advice to help you make informed decisions.

AI changes every week. In fact to prove that you can read our plain English update log to find out what you need to be aware of.

But you also have a full-time job, right? And that doesn’t involve figuring out why the results you were getting from Copilot last week have changed, or why you’re getting some heat for the fact your designers are now spending all their time fixing AI-generated slides.

We’ve pooled our knowledge in four key areas of PowerPoint and Copilot to help you get to your solution faster than arguing about it with your AI chat tool of choice for an hour.

SOS! I need help with:

• Brand
• Quality
• Workflow
• Deployment

Brand

So you have a brand, a PowerPoint template, maybe even a programmed Copilot Brand Kit, but you’re still getting off-brand results. Why is that?

• How on-brand is my Copilot output? Being able to discern how on-brand your Copilot output is, and what aspects of your brand may be causing difficulties is a convenient way to get to the heart of your Copilot problems. Learn a quick diagnostic approach to try here.
• What is a Brand Kit and how do I get one? For a comprehensive overview of what Brand Kits are, and the core component parts, review chapter 2 of our white paper.
• What’s better for brand direction – steering notes or custom skills? Did you know you can direct Copilot to create on-brand content using steering notes and custom skills? Learn the best option in this comparison article. (Coming soon)
• How to optimise your Brand Kit: A recent survey we ran saw that only 13% of Brand Kit users reported they were getting on-brand results in PowerPoint Copilot, so what makes a Brand Kit successful? We dig into Brand Kit optimisation in chapter 3 of our white paper.
• Is it possible to get on-brand results without a Brand Kit? If you’re looking for alternative options to enterprise-level deployment of an AI tool in PowerPoint, read chapter 1 of our white paper for a comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, and review chapter 2 for a closer look at if Claude can stick to brand guidelines in PowerPoint.

Quality

Our lives are increasingly full of AI-generated content, whether it’s the cutesy Autumn school calendar, or a social media graphic with Claude’s tell-tale 01, 02, 03 fingerprints, we notice it, and make quiet judgements about it. But when the stakes are higher – when it’s your corporate content and you want to make a sale, or get some internal budget, or persuade an audience to take action as part of a webinar – can you really trust AI to create quality content?

Check out these articles to help you get to the bottom of quality issues and PowerPoint Copilot:

• What is good? How does AI generate content: A helpful starting point is to consider how AI creates content in the first place and how that affects the quality of your output. We explain and test it in chapter 3 of our white paper.
• How to quickly evaluate AI-generated presentation content: We all know AI output needs checking, but how do you do it efficiently and We’ve developed an evaluation framework that allows you to assess the message and design of your content to quickly uncover just what needs fixing.
• How does the skill ‘visualise this slide’ work – and is it any good? If you’re looking to make more visual content, Copilot has a skill designed to do just that. We reviewed it and compared the output at the link above.

Workflow

PowerPoint Copilot is promised to save users hours, but is that your experience, or are you finding yourself spending hours (or tokens) fixing the slides that Copilot creates?

• The true cost of edits in PowerPoint Copilot: When content creators don’t have to create a slide the theory states that they’ll have a chunk of time freed up for other things. But is that true? We’ve tested how long it takes to create a new slide, and how long it takes to fix something Copilot created. Find out our results in this article. (Coming soon)
• Why is my slide getting worse when I ask Copilot to edit it? Is this you? It’s a peculiar phenomenon, but the more you edit something created by AI, the worse it seems to get. And in the end you don’t end up with the best output, but you settle for what looks mostly fine. And in the climate of token usage, figuring out how to get a ‘right-ish first time’ output is crucial. (Coming soon)
• Everything but the slide: Copilot is billed as a slide generation tool, in this article learn other uses for Copilot in PowerPoint to improve presentation quality and speed up your workflow. (Coming soon)

Deployment

Setting up Copilot to create beautiful on-brand content is one significant challenge facing brand owners and comms leaders, but making sure that all content creators can use Copilot and with a high degree of efficiency and accuracy is entirely another. Troubleshoot key deployment topics here.

• Copilot in PowerPoint is moving to usage-based pricing – what does that mean for slide creation? Did you see the announcement that Copilot usage in PowerPoint will move toward a token-system for creation. Review the details and what it means for your organisation in this article.
• Deployment at scale: Before you hit the big red button to deploy Copilot to all your PowerPoint content creators what do you need to consider? We cover a list of 5 areas in chapter 3 of our white paper.
• Troubleshooting access for your key assets in PowerPoint Copilot: Sometimes you have content that is relevant only to certain teams – maybe it’s confidential, or there’s a brand style that a particular team uses. Being able to generate slides that reference the right information is key to accurate presentations, and you can define access in your online environment. Learn how to serve up the right content to the right people in the linked article.
• Passing on best practice to your teams: PowerPoint is the only tool that empowers almost all of your organisation to create content – regardless of their skill-level in design or communication. Add AI onto the top of that and even if you optimise your online environment and programme the perfect Brand Kit, your users might end up causing more problems that you think. Learn some core principles for upskilling your PowerPoint content creators. (Coming soon)