Häagen-Dazs AI Assistant

The challenge

Häagen-Dazs franchise teams needed fast, reliable answers to daily operational questions without sorting through fragmented information sources, like an outdated operations manual hosted outside their core systems.

Häagen-Dazs’ operational content, from recipe instructions to closing procedures, lived on both their core internal platform and on an external site with dated, clunky navigation. Getting to the right information took longer than it should have, and that created a different problem at every level of the business.

• Corporate was running on a legacy native app that AWS was set to stop supporting, on top of operational content that was hard to maintain and harder to find.
• Franchise owners needed real-time visibility into how their store was performing and clearer answers to questions about royalties, inventory, and employee shift schedules.
• Store managers and franchise business managers needed a fast way to confirm daily tasks, like temperature logging, were getting done without checking multiple systems to find out.
• Frontline employees needed quick, reliable answers in the middle of a shift, whether that was a recipe or a first-time closing checklist, without digging through a manual that wasn’t built for the moment they needed it.

What we did

• Modernized the technical foundation first, migrating Häagen-Dazs off a legacy, Windows-based native app and rebuilding the core proprietary platform on Laravel and Vue.
• Built Ask Adam, a conversational AI tool built on Anthropic’s Claude and layered on top of the core platform. The AI assistant chatbot gives store teams one place to ask operational questions instead of searching within the platform or a separate manual site.
• Used Anthropic’s Claude Haiku to power real-time chat responses and Claude Sonnet to extract and structure Häagen-Dazs operational content, including text-in-images embedded in the source manual. Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku also supported building, testing, and deploying the application itself.
• Built guardrails through an internal content dashboard so the Clockwork and Häagen-Dazs teams can control exactly what information Ask Adam draws from. That keeps every answer tied to an authoritative source and prevents Ask Adam from inventing answers outside of the approved content.
• Leveraged time freed up by our AI-accelerated development process to think beyond the brief and deliver more value to our client. We identified an opportunity to bring real-time operational data, including temperature logs, sales volume, inventory levels, and employee shift schedules, directly into the chat, extending Ask Adam beyond static reference lookups.
• Designed Ask Adam’s personality with built-in guardrails so safety-critical situations, like a medical emergency, get a direct, serious answer rather than an in-character one.
• Built accessible color and interface choices into the chat experience alongside the Häagen-Dazs brand team, and added a feedback option on every response so the team can track helpfulness and accuracy as usage grows.

Outcomes

5-click minimum → 1 go-to source

Before, it took Häagen-Dazs team members looking for specific answers a minimum of 5 clicks to get to relevant information within their training manuals. And then, they had to dig for more details within a second system that has clunky and difficult to control navigation. Now, employees simply open Ask Adam, ask their operational question, and have answers with appropriate direct link citations within seconds — all inside a single AI assistant chat interface.

165 resource sections, one search away

Ask Adam’s knowledge base spans the full operations manual: more than 67,000 words, including 100+ printed pages of shop operations and recipes, plus 65 pages of nutritional guidance. Images and photos buried in the manual, never searchable before, are now factored into every answer.