From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Web Services Mauro Rallo
HEMA’s engineers replaced portal-hopping through disconnected wikis and IT catalogs with HAL, an internal assistant that provides instant answers from a structured knowledge layer built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The project was validated with a one-month staging rollout for engineers and business users before going to production. The result is that teams can find procedural IT and API guidance in seconds from chat or the IDE instead of spending an afternoon navigating multiple portals, and the architecture is set up to evolve from read-only answers to actions using MCP.
Why it matters
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.