How Dun & Bradstreet and IBM's new AI Will Help Procurement

Developed in collaboration between Dun & Bradstreet and IBM, D&B Ask Procurement is a new AI assistant designed to accelerate the discovery and analysis of supply chain risks and opportunities.

This assistant leverages generative AI to provide quick and intelligent insights for procurement professionals.

AI at the forefront

Gen AI scaling is seeing greater profits for companies at the forefront of the innovation, with IBM saying such companies are seeing a 72% greater annual net profits and 17% more annual revenue growth than their peers.

It's also expected that the productivity of knowledge workers will be improved by at least 70% with the use of GenAI according to McKinsey.

A vital step toward unlocking these gains is the adoption of AI assistants to transform working efficiency across the enterprise. Now IBM is making it possible for companies to augment their workforce with digital labour, which can be used in every area of the business to achieve desired outcomes at an unprecedented speed.

Build the AI for you

IBM watsonx Orchestrate is a low-code platform that helps businesses automate high-value workflows and decision-making processes by integrating various AI models, data sources, and business applications.

The new AI assistant builder is a next-generation builder studio that leverages the power of generative AI and digital skills to empower organisations and domain experts to quickly and easily create new and compelling AI assistants through a powerful low-code experience.

Using purpose-built AI assistants, customers and employees can seamlessly complete tasks and complex processes that are facilitated by a highly engaging natural language experience.

The AI assistant builder gives builders access to a low-code generative AI and automation studio to stand up large language model (LLM) powered assistants that are grounded in business context, data, and automation.

Through the AI assistant builder, people can extend their investments in automation and scale adoption through a highly conversational interface that is infused with trustworthy AI.

GenAI capabilities are then delivered natively by IBM’s trusted and transparent LLMs, fine-tuned for specific business functions. Given the flexibility and control to decide when and how LLMs are used via content grounding, AI-guided actions and conversational skills.

IBM watsonx Orchestrate provides natural, optimised experiences for the customer and employees, guiding them through the completion of multi-step processes while letting generative AI do the heavy lifting. It also powers the development of purpose-built assistants to boost productivity across the enterprise.

IBM has spoken of two new generative AI assistants for critical business functions: IBM watsonx Assistant for Z, a generative AI assistant revolutionising mainframe management.

Partnering with IBM Research, it employs a chat-focused model, granite.13b.labrador, trained on extensive data for curated responses.

Integrated with Watsonx Orchestrate, it enhances productivity by automating tasks and facilitating knowledge transfer, enabling efficient mainframe operations. This is in addition to the D&B Ask Procurement powered by Watsonx Orchestrate.

Ask Procurement

Dun & Bradstreet and IBM are collaborating to introduce D&B Ask Procurement, an AI assistant tailored for procurement professionals to expedite the discovery and analysis of supply chain risks and opportunities.

Connected to global-leading business insights from Dun & Bradstreet and built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate, Ask Procurement will provide a quick and easy way to help accelerate multi-step analysis.

“Enterprises need partners who can help them scale responsible AI adoption, which starts with trusted data,” adds Gary Kotovets, Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Dun & Bradstreet.

“We’re bringing together Dun & Bradstreet and IBM’s nearly 300 years of combined experience,” Gary continues,

“to create generative AI solutions that harness Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud and IBM watsonx Orchestrate to fuel responsible generative AI adoption, starting with Ask Procurement. By leveraging IBM watsonx, D&B Ask Procurement simplifies, accelerates, and reduces the cost of certain essential procurement decisions. Ask Procurement is just one of many examples of how, together, we can help clients drive savings, optimise business processes, and improve risk management with generative AI and reliable data."

Ask Procurement calculates answers to complex questions allowing for quicker and more intelligent decision making faster than ever before.

The offering uses watsonx technology and draws upon Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud, which contains more than half a billion private and public companies. It also includes market-leading Identity Resolution, including the D-U-N-S Number and the company’s generative AI capabilities.

D&B Ask Procurement will offer an easy-to-use Generative AI assistant, connected to global-leading risk, financial, and firmographic analytics from the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud.

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