Dutch retailer HEMA has built an internal assistant that brings scattered service catalogs, technical documentation and process instructions into chat and development tools. HAL serves developers, product owners and business analysts across a company with more than 750 stores, replacing searches across several portals with answers that HEMA says now arrive in seconds.
The system runs a Strands agent on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and searches knowledge bases containing documentation, API specifications, event schemas and ownership data. Model Context Protocol provides a standard tool interface for HAL’s web chat, Kiro, Claude and other compatible clients. AgentCore Gateway can turn OpenAPI definitions and Lambda functions into those tools without a separate custom MCP server for each source.
External clients authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID rather than receiving AWS credentials. A dedicated gateway exposes only read-only knowledge, while Active Directory groups control access. HEMA tested the system with technical and business users for a month before moving it into wider production.
HAL currently answers questions but cannot make changes. HEMA plans to add carefully scoped actions, starting with requests such as provisioning an AWS account. That next step carries more risk: the existing identity and authorization model can be reused, but each write tool will still need explicit permissions, audit records and safeguards against an agent acting on an ambiguous request.