From portal-hopping to instant answers: HEMA’s journey with MCP and Amazon Bedrock
TL;DR
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.
Nauti's Take
HEMA shows a practical advantage of MCP: one assistant can serve internal knowledge inside existing tools instead of forcing developers to hop between portals. The limit is that this is an AWS case study, so costs, adoption numbers and failure rates stay vague.
Mid-sized companies with scattered internal docs can borrow the architecture, especially the credential-free client setup, but should measure real time saved before scaling.
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