The Service Catalog Under HEMA's AI Assistant

HEMA, the hundred-year-old Dutch retailer, had already done the unglamorous part: over the years it built a structured picture of its own technology landscape — a service catalog mapping people to teams, teams to services, and services to the APIs the company exposes. What broke was the informal channel. As the engineering organization grew, the habit of just asking the person next to you stopped working, and answers got scattered across portals. AWS's account of the project says HEMA built a knowledge layer on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to make those answers reachable again. The interesting design lesson is that the assistant sits on top of a map the company made for itself; without that map, a chat interface has nothing trustworthy to point at.