How NorthBay Solutions built AskBaba, a production, multi-agent platform powered by Anthropic's Claude on Amazon Bedrock to turn enterprise data into instant answers and automated action for every persona in the business, from the store floor to the boardroom
Executive Summary
Tamimi Markets, one of Saudi Arabia's largest and longest-established grocery retailers, faced a familiar enterprise problem at an unfamiliar scale: hundreds of millions of operational data points locked behind BI queues and specialist teams, while high-volume retail work, ordering, forecasting, customer engagement — stayed manual and spreadsheet-bound. Rather than pursue a narrow point solution, Tamimi partnered with NorthBay Solutions, an AWS Premier and Anthropic partner, to build AskBaba: a bilingual (Arabic/English) agentic AI platform powered by Anthropic's Claude on Amazon Bedrock, running inside Tamimi's own AWS environment and delivered where employees already work, in Microsoft Teams.
The result is a business milestone as much as a technical one: Tamimi Markets is the first retailer in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to run agentic AI at enterprise scale, not a pilot, not a single chatbot, but a governed, production platform of 19+ specialized Claude-powered agents that answer questions in seconds, automate daily purchase ordering, forecast demand, and re-engage customers. AskBaba delivers measurable value across every persona in the organization — store managers, category buyers, HR, IT, finance, and executive leadership and across every operational stream, from analytics and procurement to forecasting and customer engagement, all while keeping enterprise data under Tamimi's own governance. Claude powers both what AskBaba does for the business and how NorthBay designed, built, and delivered it.
Results at a Glance
Note: figures reflect observed production usage; select figures are being validated with Tamimi Markets during Anthropic's reference and consent process.
The Challenge
Tamimi Markets runs a nationwide network of stores generating enormous operational data, hundreds of millions of transaction line items across sales, inventory, stock movement, promotions, and procurement, flowing from SAP S/4HANA into an Amazon Redshift data warehouse of more than 130 tables. The data existed; access to it did not.
Store managers, category buyers, and executives depended on BI dashboards and analyst queues for even routine questions, how a store performed yesterday, which products were running low, whether a promotion moved volume. Answers took hours or days, arrived in English only, and required desk access. Meanwhile, high-volume operational processes such as demand forecasting, competitor price tracking, and customer win-back campaigns were manual, spreadsheet-driven, and dependent on a small group of specialists. Daily purchase-order creation, by contrast, already ran on TIPS, Tamimi’s own proven ordering platform, and one of the retailer’s strongest existing systems with room to add a real-time validation layer as volume and complexity grew.
Tamimi Markets wanted a single, trustworthy assistant its employees could talk to: one that understood retail language in both Arabic and English, answered from governed enterprise data rather than guesswork, respected each employee's role and permissions, and could safely take action, not just report. It had to serve every persona in the business, from the store floor to the boardroom, run inside the tools employees already use (Microsoft Teams), and scale from a pilot to the entire organization.
The Solution: An Agentic Platform Built on Claude & AWS
NorthBay Solutions designed AskBaba as an agentic AI platform with Claude at its core, running on Amazon Bedrock inside Tamimi Markets' own AWS environment, keeping the client's enterprise data under the customer's governance, so every persona gets a different, role-appropriate answer from the same trusted foundation.
A supervisor–specialist agent architecture
Rather than a single monolithic bot, NorthBay built a LangGraph (Day 1 Architecture and progressing towards an AgentCore architecture) multi-agent system in which a Claude-powered supervisor understands each request, then routes it to one of 19+ specialist agents, sales analytics, inventory, stock movement, sales budgets, product catalog, competitor pricing, predictive forecasting, purchase-order creation and inquiry, HR knowledge, IT incidents, business events, weather, scheduled reporting, and more. Each specialist combines Claude's reasoning with governed tools: text-to-SQL over the Redshift warehouse, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over HR and policy documents, ServiceNow ticketing, SAP purchase-order APIs, and Airflow job scheduling. Agents complete their task or escalate back to the supervisor, so conversations flow naturally across domains.
Why Claude
Reasoning over enterprise schemas. Claude reliably translates ambiguous, bilingual retail questions into precise SQL over a 130+ table warehouse, respecting business rules (posting vs. transaction dates, fresh vs. non-fresh classification, store hierarchies).
- Multimodal understanding. Claude's vision capability reads product photos, shelf images, and competitor brochures; voice queries flow through transcription into the same agents.
- Arabic + English fluency. One assistant serves the whole workforce, detecting and responding in each user's language.
- Safety and control. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, role-based access control enforced at the agent layer, and prompt-injection hardening keep responses grounded and appropriate for the workplace.
- The Solution: An Agentic Platform Built on Claude & AWS
Built and delivered with Claude
The platform is built on AWS with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD with environment promotion and production deploy authorization, SageMaker ML pipelines for demand forecasting with SHAP explainability, and event-driven integration (SQS, Lambda, Airflow) to SAP and messaging channels. NorthBay's delivery team also adopted Claude in its own engineering workflow, using Claude-assisted development with mandatory human review, plan-first tickets, and self-review gates. In effect, Claude powers both what AskBaba does for Tamimi Markets and how NorthBay built and delivered it, accelerating architecture, coding, and testing from the first release through every extension phase, shortening time-to-production without compromising the engineering rigor an enterprise platform demands.
Delivery & Adoption
AskBaba is in production and has been serving Tamimi Markets employees since 2025, delivered through four major releases and two funded extension phases, evidence of sustained customer commitment rather than a one-off pilot.
- Production platform. Live across development, QA, and production environments on AWS, with formal release management, a 12-week software-quality-assurance cycle, and a hotfix-governed production freeze discipline.
- Where employees work. Delivered inside Microsoft Teams (with an embedded web chat option), so adoption required no new application, employees message AskBaba like a colleague.
- Broad functional adoption. Natural-language sales/inventory/procurement analytics; HR-policy Q&A via RAG; ServiceNow incident creation from chat; a real-time validation layer on daily TIPS purchase-order creation, with SAP integration; ML demand forecasts with explainable drivers; image, barcode, and voice inputs; and administrator-composed broadcast messaging.
- Operational governance. Enterprise security program (IAM least-privilege, KMS encryption, secrets management, OIDC-only pipelines), PDPL-aligned data handling, and full auditability of agent actions.
Business Impact
AskBaba has changed the day-to-day economics of data access and retail operations at Tamimi Markets:
- From days to seconds. Routine analytics questions that previously waited on BI/reporting queues are now answered in under 30 seconds, self-service, 24/7, in Arabic or English.
- Growing daily usage. Adoption grew more than 40% within months of launch (from ~100 to 140+ daily active employees) across stores and head office.
- Half a billion+ records at conversational reach. The assistant reasons over 500M+ transaction line items and 130+ warehouse tables previously accessible only to data specialists.
- TIPS, validated. AskBaba adds a real-time validation layer on top of TIPS, Tamimi’s proven purchase-order platform, cross-checking daily purchase-order creation across the store network and giving every PO an explainable rationale freeing buyer hours for higher-value work.
- Forecasting with accountability. SageMaker demand forecasts with SHAP explainability inform ordering decisions, with drivers (events such as Ramadan and Eid, weather, promotions) visible to the business.
- Faster employee communications. Administrators broadcast rich announcements to 1,000+ recipients across Teams and web chat in minutes, with per-recipient delivery tracking.
Value Across Business
AskBaba's supervisor-agent architecture means the same platform serves every persona in the business differently — each getting the analytics, automation, or knowledge relevant to their role, without separate tools or integrations to manage.
| Persona | Before AskBaba | Ask Baba | Business Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store Managers | Waited hours on BI/analyst queues for routine store performance and stock questions | Ask in natural language (Arabic or English) via Teams, answered in under 30 seconds | Faster, more confident decisions at the point of operation |
| Category Buyers & Merchandising | Purchase orders well-handled by TIPS; slow, manual competitor price tracking | TIPS purchase orders validated in real time with explainable rationale; image-based competitor and shelf checks | Buyer hours redirected from data-wrangling to negotiation and assortment strategy |
| Finance & Executive Leadership | Limited, delayed visibility into demand drivers and enterprise performance | Self-serve access to 500M+ transaction records; SHAP-explainable demand forecasts tied to real business drivers | Faster, evidence-based decisions at the leadership level |
| HR | Policy questions handled manually, one employee at a time | RAG-powered HR policy Q&A, bilingual, available 24/7 | HR team's time redirected to higher-value people work |
| IT & Service Desk | Incidents logged and triaged manually | Employees create ServiceNow tickets directly from chat | Faster incident capture and routing |
| Corporate Communications | Broadcasting announcements across a distributed workforce was slow and untracked | Rich announcements to 1,000+ recipients across Teams and web chat, with per-recipient delivery tracking | Faster, measurable internal communications |
| Customer Marketing (roadmap) | Dormant customers and lapsed products went unaddressed | Personalized, consent-managed win-back campaigns matched to live promotions over WhatsApp and email | Expected: recovered revenue from lapsed customers |
What's Next?
Tamimi Markets and NorthBay Solutions continue to extend the platform on the same Claude-on-Bedrock foundation: competitor price intelligence across major KSA retailers, and personalized customer re-engagement identifying dormant customers and lapsed products, matching them to live promotions, and reaching them over WhatsApp and email with consent-managed, bilingual campaigns. Each increment reuses the same governed agent architecture, shortening time-to-value with every release and extending Tamimi's first-mover position as Saudi retail's digital transformation, aligned with Vision 2030, accelerates.
About NorthBay Solutions
NorthBay Solutions is an AWS Premier consulting partner and Anthropic partner specializing in data, analytics, and generative AI. NorthBay designs and delivers production AI systems, from agentic assistants to ML platforms, for enterprises across the Middle East, North America, and beyond.
Tamimi Markets is one of Saudi Arabia’s largest grocery retail chains, operating a nationwide network of stores and serving millions of customers with a commitment to quality and value. It is the first retailer in the Kingdom to run agentic AI at enterprise scale, built end to end on Anthropic’s Claude, extending value across every persona in the business, from store operations to executive leadership.
Availability
AskBaba was designed and delivered by NorthBay Solutions on Anthropic's Claude via Amazon Bedrock. To learn how NorthBay can bring production-grade Agentic AI to your enterprise, connect with an expert or find offerings on the AWS Marketplace.
