HEMA Built an Enterprise AI Assistant with MCP and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

AWS ML Blog · rss · 2026-09-24

AWS ML Blog details how Dutch retailer HEMA (750+ stores) built HAL, an internal AI assistant on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and MCP, consolidating knowledge scattered across wikis and portals. Key architecture: local Strands tools query Bedrock Knowledge Bases directly; an MCP connection to AgentCore Gateway (auto-generated from OpenAPI specs and Lambda) serves live APIs and service-catalog lookups — no custom MCP server code. Security uses Microsoft Entra ID OAuth, JWT inbound auth, an outbound OAuth2 token vault, and AD-group access control (read-only today). AgentCore Runtime, Memory, and Guardrails provide hosting, memory, and filtering with EU regions and Dutch support. Answers that once took an afternoon of portal-hopping now take seconds inside IDEs and chat.

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