Dun & Bradstreet Accelerates Procurement and Supplier Risk Decisions With AI Assistant, Powered by World-Class Data and IBM Technology

Published a month ago via Business Wire

D&B Ask Procurement™ provides instant view into supplier insights

Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB), a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, announced today the availability of D&B Ask Procurement, its generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) assistant built in collaboration with IBM (NYSE: IBM), that synthesizes vast datasets and provides intelligent recommendations to help procurement teams make faster data-driven decisions, mitigate risks and drive efficiencies across their supplier networks.

Connected to Dun & Bradstreet’s comprehensive business risk, financial, and firmographic data and insights, D&B Ask Procurement helps teams to query critical supplier insights, expedite analysis and reporting, and identify suppliers for engagement. Built with IBM watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai technology with support from IBM Consulting, D&B Ask Procurement is an AI assistant that also leverages an agentic AI framework to provide advanced reasoning capabilities and autonomous decision making. Utilizing a conversational chat interface, users can quickly and more easily expand insights to help de-risk their supply chain, increase productivity. and ultimately reduce costs.

“D&B Ask Procurement unlocks the full depth and breadth of Dun & Bradstreet’s content for procurement professionals to be able to quickly access a 360-degree view of a company’s business relationships and make more informed decisions,” said Brian Filanowski, General Manager, Finance & Risk Solutions, Dun & Bradstreet. “We’re committed to fusing Dun & Bradstreet’s trusted data and analytics with the Gen AI capabilities of IBM watsonx Orchestrate to power solutions like D&B Ask Procurement that deliver meaningful competitive advantages to our customer’s businesses.”

Key capabilities of D&B Ask Procurement include:

  • Critical Supplier Insights: Powered by Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud, containing over 580 million public and private entities around the globe, D&B Ask Procurement answers questions concerning existing or potential supplier risks, financials, ESG, beneficial ownership, legal filings and events, and more. The assistant also leverages proprietary predictive risk scores and analytics on suppliers’ business and financial health.
  • Company Data Integration: In addition to Dun & Bradstreet data, organizations can incorporate their own data and insights, such as spend and purchase order history, into D&B Ask Procurement based on their own involvement with suppliers.
  • Multi-step Analysis & Reporting: D&B Ask Procurement can easily calculate analysis reports by synthesizing numerous data outputs, generates risk summaries based on key findings, and compares suppliers’ attributes, transforming previous manual analysis processes from hours to seconds.
  • Identify Suppliers for Engagement: D&B Ask Procurement quickly builds comparisons of multiple suppliers to help organizations make the most optimal selections. It also identifies suppliers in an organization’s portfolio that require outreach and helps to eliminate lengthy research during routine evaluations.
  • Easy Accessibility: D&B Ask Procurement is easily accessible via a web-based application, helping to deliver real-time answers when and where needed.

“One key point of entry for Gen AI adoption is AI assistants, and together IBM and Dun & Bradstreet are collaborating to bring clients new innovations within the procurement domain,” said Parul Mishra, Vice President of Product Management, Digital Labor at IBM. “With D&B Ask Procurement, an AI assistant built on the foundation of watsonx Orchestrate, users can seamlessly complete tasks and automate complex processes with natural language, helping drive efficiency, cost-savings and higher productivity.”

This announcement is an outcome of the strategic collaboration between Dun & Bradstreet and IBM, combining IBM’s AI and data platform and consulting services with Dun & Bradstreet’s supply chain expertise and vast sets of trusted data to help organizations responsibly expand their use of generative AI. Leveraging IBM watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai can help enterprises simplify how they build scalable AI assistants and agents, integrate existing workflows, and simplify complex processes across the business.

D&B Ask Procurement aligns with the responsible data and AI principles that guide Dun & Bradstreet’s development of data and AI-fueled solutions, continuing the company’s journey in providing AI solutions businesses need to efficiently access comprehensive data and analytics. D&B Ask Procurement comes on the heels of another recently launched advanced Gen AI assistant, ChatD&B™, which answers questions posed on a commercial entity within seconds, using Dun & Bradstreet’s validated and timely data to deliver relevant and accurate output.

D&B Ask Procurement is now available in North America, with other markets soon to follow. Learn more and discover a demonstration of D&B Ask Procurement here.

About Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, enables companies around the world to improve their business performance. Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform their businesses. Since 1841, companies of every size have relied on Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage risk and reveal opportunity. For more information on Dun & Bradstreet, please visit www.dnb.com.

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