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Guide 01 · Foundations

Encoding a Brand Guide as an AI Skill

A public brand guide becomes a reusable SharePoint AI skill that judges any file against tone, color, typography, and photography rules — across whatever file types you throw at it.

Takeaway 01
A brand guide is corporate knowledge — the skill captures it as a reusable AI prompt.
Takeaway 02
One skill handles many file formats; you don't write a per-format reviewer.
Takeaway 03
The skill returns both a score and reasoning — quantitative and qualitative in one pass.

The Public Brand Guide as Source

The demo starts with Uppababy's online brand guide — a deep, publicly shared compliance document covering color palettes, typography, photography, and tone. That guide is the corporate knowledge the AI will enforce. Without it, the skill is a generic taste check; with it, the skill is a real compliance reviewer.

The skill is only as good as the source. A vague brand guide produces vague reviews. A specific, written guide produces specific, actionable feedback.

The narrator deliberately picked Uppababy because their guide is unusually thorough — color hex codes, photographic style rules, allowed and forbidden language. That depth makes the AI's judgements more like "here's the rule it violated" and less like "it doesn't feel right."

Teams sometimes assume the AI just "knows their brand" because it has seen their website. It doesn't — and trying to rely on that produces inconsistent reviews. The skill needs an explicit source it can quote.

The Brand Review Skill

The Brand Review Skill is a SharePoint AI Skill — a reusable building block that takes a file as input and returns a structured review as output. It encodes the brand guide once and applies it everywhere. Once built, anyone in the org can call it; it lives in the skill catalog, not in someone's head.

Skills are corporate reusables. You write the brand-review logic once and every team uses the same canonical reviewer — no drift, no "but my version said different."

This is the difference between a one-off prompt and a productized capability. A one-off prompt lives in chat history. A skill lives in the library, has a name, can be called from buttons, and can be governed centrally.

Multi-Format Support

The skill handles whatever file format you give it — Word documents, PowerPoint decks, images, PDFs — and returns the same shape of review for each. The format detection and parsing happens inside the skill; the caller doesn't have to write a Word-reviewer and an image-reviewer separately.

One skill, many file types. The brand guide is one document; the assets it governs are many. The skill bridges them.

This matters because brand compliance is rarely about one file type. A campaign produces decks, social images, copy docs, and emails simultaneously. A reviewer that only handles PDFs would force a workflow split; one that handles everything keeps the workflow whole.

How the Skill Judges Compliance

For each file the skill produces two outputs: a numeric score and a written explanation. The score lets you sort and filter; the explanation tells you what specifically to fix. Same prompt, same brand guide, same scoring — the AI is consistent because the skill is consistent.

A score alone is useless ("3/10 — fix it"). An explanation alone is hard to operationalize. Together they let you triage at scale and act per file.

In the demo, one file passes and the others have issues. The notes describe what's wrong and what to fix — for example, color usage outside the palette, off-brand tone, photography that violates the photographic style rules. That's the level of specificity the public Uppababy guide makes possible.

"Brand compliance is too subjective for AI." With a thorough enough written guide, most reviews collapse into rule matching: was the right hex used? Was the typography from the approved list? AI is fine at that — and the parts that remain genuinely subjective still get a defensible second opinion.
Flashcards — Foundations
01 · Foundations
Brand Guide Source
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The written brand compliance document (public or internal) that defines colors, typography, photography, and tone. The AI skill is only as specific as this source.
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01 · Foundations
Brand Review Skill
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A reusable SharePoint AI Skill that encodes a brand guide once and judges any file against it — returning a numeric score and a written explanation.
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01 · Foundations
Multi-Format Support
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The skill handles Word, PowerPoint, images, PDFs, and more — returning the same review shape regardless. One reviewer instead of one per file type.
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01 · Foundations
Score + Notes Output
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The two-part output of a brand review — a numeric score (for sorting and triage) and a written explanation (for fixing). Together they let you operate at scale.
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