{
  "id": 9394681,
  "title": "From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/23/from-portal-hopping-to-instant-answers-hemas-journey-with-mcp-and",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-23T18:41:09.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "AWS Machine Learning",
    "slug": "aws-machine-learning",
    "url": "https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/from-portal-hopping-to-instant-answers-hemas-journey-with-mcp-and-amazon-bedrock/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "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.",
  "summary": "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.",
  "key_points": [
    "HEMA engineers struggled with fragmented internal knowledge",
    "Developed HAL AI assistant using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore",
    "Integrated HAL with MCP for instant knowledge access"
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}