Published: Apr 28, 2025

NCS and align.me develop GenAI framework to enable businesses to achieve scalability at speed

NCS in Australia and align.me, a B2B sales and marketing consultancy, have co-developed a pioneering AI orchestration framework that enables businesses to achieve scalability at speed with agentic AI.

This will be critical for customers in leveraging generative AI in future, with structure required to manage ‘AI agents’ – autonomous software programs simulating human intelligence to perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with users – effectively. It also enables hyper-personalisation, with transformative benefits for clients who are keen to achieve rapid business growth through automation.

Clients will be enabled to “do more with the same” due to automation, rapid experimentation to test and optimise, and having the flexibility to build iterative workflows to adapt to moving client demands. They will also be able to achieve greater scalability with high quality outputs.
 

“The risk for most companies and for our whole industry is that simplistic use of generative AI will result in ‘bad marketing at scale'.

“The enormous care, personalisation, and thought that normally goes into great marketing is even more critical with the advent of GenAI than when sales and marketing decisions were wholly manual. What we need is smart inputs, solid data, thoughtful guardrails, and hundreds of iterations before agents are considered ’field-ready’.“

Hugh Macfarlane, Founder and CEO, align.me

AI orchestration can radically improve the accuracy and reliability of agent-created outcomes including the ability to amplify creativity, improve cost efficiencies, contribute to time savings, deliver productivity gains and enables rapid iterations that are imperative to business and digital change.

“By automating and integrating AI solutions repeatedly and reliably into existing products, we empower our humans to spend more time adding value to clients,” explains Hugh Macfarlane, Founder and CEO of align.me, on his business’ partnership with NCS.

The solution will underpin align.me’s go-to-market planning platform and aligns with its ambitious business growth plans, using Amazon Bedrock as a fully managed service to develop GenAI with security, privacy, and responsible AI considerations in mind. It may also be an integral foundation for further AI solutions, dashboards and integrations developed by NCS.
 

align.me supports growing businesses and enterprise clients with B2B sales and marketing that keeps buyers front and centre of all plans, and also works with ecosystem vendors – mostly in IT – to execute successful sales and marketing activities.

While based locally in Melbourne, its tech-savvy team already leverages AI to support clients in some 45 countries. An array of AI agents are already deployed by align.me in a cloud-based go-to-market planning application that’s enabled its team to achieve efficiencies and improve the quality of outputs for collaborators.

“These agents have allowed us to distribute knowledge and skills that were previously tightly held and put those skills in the hands of a network of consultants who hold other skills and relationships and other languages globally,” says Hugh.

“The challenge has been all of our AI agents have been ‘single-shot’, largely serving a narrow purpose and being manually orchestrated by our own application. This has made improvements slow as we’ve been unable to run side-by-side tests to optimise models, parameters, prompts, pre-trained RAG, or data. It has also been slow for us to rearchitect processes. Effective AI orchestration can be wickedly expensive too.”
 

The innovative framework provides an orchestration layer on top of the foundation models and APIs surfaced with AWS Bedrock and enables detailed mechanisms for control and orchestration, which is how agents are provided with data, instructions, foundation models, parameters, and outputs, along with the order in which those agents interact.

This allows for dynamic and repeatable generation of outputs and content. This enables align.me to fine-tune and deliver highly optimised AI agents that deliver hyper-personalised guidance to clients. Growth at scale is enabled with greater control at an input level and fewer challenges due to script orchestration too.

The solution enables deeper, high quality AI orchestration with less likelihood of AI bias and hallucinations. Each ‘AI agent’ had previously worked sequentially, but now each agent can “talk” to each other in a myriad of different ways, with deeper integration to achieve common goals and higher control over both the metadata and parameters. Fine-tuning is achievable, unlocking micro-level personalisation and segmentation for different clients and use cases.
 

The solution will give align.me’s team capacity for rapidly iterating and evolving how it uses AI to deliver scalable sales and marketing guidance to clients that enable faster, more efficient decision making informed by intelligent business insights.

Cost efficiencies will be gained with greater control by clients over “how and when” AI agents operate. Tasks can be handled in a way that minimises waste and optimises performance. Longer term, enhancements to cost tracking and attribution will be achievable. There will also be continuous improvements and data-driven optimisations through smarter testing of prompts, agents and flows.

“As a first use case for this orchestration, NCS’s data scientists will also be adding a new capability for our go-to-market planning application to enrich the planning discussions with an analysis of how competitors are representing their capabilities in similar domains so that our consultants can more easily help our planning clients to find ‘clear air’ – a space they can dominate,” says Hugh.

“It will help improve the richness of planning decisions.”

Through effective use of agentic AI, employee productivity gains are also possible. As examples:

• Employees can focus on higher-value activities that require human intelligence and creativity, rather than manual, repetitive tasks.
• There is faster research completion and quicker turnaround times for clients
• AI agents can act as research assistants for employees (non-coders) in fostering a data-driven culture that enhances informed decision-making and strategic planning.

align.me anticipates to realise all of these benefits through this collaborative work with NCS, and more. Pursuing enhancements with AI is also integral to align.me retaining its competitive edge in an evolving marketing landscape.

“We expect to reduce the time we presently take to ideate, scope, experiment, and operationalise single agents from three months to three weeks per employed agent,” says Hugh.

“The orchestration of those agents (which agents operate and the order in which the agents operate) adds further benefits that we can’t quantify because we simply can’t do that today.”

At a time Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has gone as far as to predict in his book Our AI Journey that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists and creative professionals for will be handled by AI at nearly no cost in future, digital transformation – including embracing AI in a purposeful and strategic way – makes good business sense in the marketing sector.

“Scalability is as important for us as a B2B sales and marketing consultancy as it is for our clients,” says Hugh.

“By enhancing our AI capabilities and codifying some of our underlying intellectual property, our capacity to serve companies globally through our finite local consultancy network is going to rapidly increase. That’s powerful, and that’s what’s achievable with the strategic use of technology and a partner alongside us like NCS.”
 

More value. Better quality. Different.

Choosing NCS, a trusted technology services business that’s also an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premium Partner, was a natural fit for align.me.

Since reaching this AWS partner status more than a decade ago, NCS has consistently demonstrated the highest level of specialisation, deep AWS technical expertise, and a proven track record of customer success across all AWS validated qualifications.

align.me has worked closely with NCS Australia’s team, including AWS National Sales Lead, David Rosengrave and consultants in our Data & AI practice, to engineer a framework that will deliver long-term results.

“We’ve really enjoyed working closely with NCS Australia’s talented and hardworking team,” says Hugh.

“NCS’s data scientists have built an orchestration framework that will allow us to treat agents as objects, passing data and requests to one, having it interact with other special-purpose agents, having them collaborate, and even experiment with the order in which agents collaborate on outcome.”