From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock
HEMA, a 100-year-old Dutch retailer, turned developer portal-hopping into instant answers by building HAL, an internal AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), HAL delivers governed knowledge inside the tools teams already use, with no AWS credentials on the client and security anchored in Microsoft Entra ID.
In the story from HEMA, engineers faced a challenge with fragmented internal knowledge. They used to spend significant time portal-hopping across disconnected wikis, service catalogs, and IT portals to find answers. To address this, HEMA developed HAL, an internal AI assistant built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. This solution aimed to consolidate HEMA's structured infrastructure knowledge into a single, governed source of truth.
The first step involved creating a standalone HAL assistant with its own chat UI, which answered questions from HEMA's knowledge. Once this foundation proved successful, HAL was then integrated with the tools people already used through MCP, allowing for instant access to knowledge from within their IDEs or chat windows.
Written by urgent.news from AWS Machine Learning's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
