AI guidelines for your team: keep your brand recognisable

Why you need agreements

AI is no longer a project you can plan. It’s already part of your team’s work, often without anyone calling it that. One person uses it for a first draft, another has it write entire texts.

That’s fine. But without agreements, your brand sounds different from one colleague to the next. Images appear that don’t match your style. And nobody knows what can and can’t go into a chat. Agreements give direction without banning AI.

Keep the agreements short. One page that everyone reads works better than a lengthy policy that disappears into a folder. Put them in your brand manual, next to your tone of voice and visual identity, so people find them where they already look.

Agree which tools you use

Start with a short list of tools your team may use, and what for. That makes it easier to set up settings, instructions and accounts. It also stops work from getting scattered across personal accounts.

Check the terms of each tool. What happens to the information you enter? Is there a business version? If in doubt, ask someone who knows about privacy and security to take a look.

Give AI your brand, not your secrets

An assistant writes better when it knows your brand. Agree which brand information everyone provides, and make sure it’s the same version everywhere.

Be just as clear about what doesn’t belong in a chat. Personal data of customers, members or clients, confidential figures and contracts usually don’t. If someone is unsure, the rule is simple: ask first, paste later.

Always provide this brand information:

• Tone of voice. A short description with example sentences that do and don’t fit.
• Fixed terms. Product names, how to write your organisation’s name and words you avoid.
• Audience. Who you write for and whether you address people formally or informally.
• Visual identity details. Colour codes and typefaces, for design or coding tasks.

Set rules for images and logo

Images need extra attention. An AI tool easily creates a picture that looks nice but doesn’t match your visual language. Agree what you do use AI images for, such as sketches and internal presentations, and what you don’t.

Never let AI recreate or alter your logo. Always use the real logo files from your brand manual. The same goes for faces of real people and for products you sell: don’t let such an image give the impression that it’s a real photo.

Check AI images against your visual identity too. Do the colours fit? Is the style the same as your other images? An image that’s slightly off stands out more next to your own photos and illustrations than you think.

Keep a human in charge

Agree that everything going out is checked by a person. Someone who knows the brand checks whether the text is right, whether the tone fits and whether the facts are correct. AI can sound convincing and still make things up.

Also decide who owns the agreements. Tools change quickly, so review them a few times a year. Ask the team what works and what doesn’t, and adjust the agreements accordingly.

Don’t want everyone pasting guidelines into a chat themselves? With the MarkBase AI connection, an assistant such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor fetches up-to-date brand details read-only, with the same permissions as the user.