How Dun & Bradstreet and IBM Will Help Procurement Teams
Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, announced the availability of D&B Ask Procurement, its generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) assistant built in collaboration with IBM, that synthesises vast datasets and provides intelligent recommendations to help procurement teams make faster data-driven decisions, mitigate risks and drive efficiencies across their supplier networks.
D&B Ask Procurement
Connected to Dun & Bradstreet's business risk, financial and firmographic data and insights, D&B Ask Procurement will help teams 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 leverages an agentic AI framework to provide advanced reasoning capabilities and autonomous decision-making.
Through a conversational chat interface, people using the platform can quickly and more easily expand insights to help de-risk their supply chain, increase productivity and 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," says 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: Organisations can incorporate their own data and insights, such as spend and purchase order history, into D&B Ask Procurement based on their involvement with suppliers.
Multi-step analysis and reporting: D&B Ask Procurement can easily calculate analysis reports by synthesising numerous data outputs, generating risk summaries based on key findings and comparing 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 organisations make the most optimal selections. It also identifies suppliers in an organisation'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.
New innovations within the procurement domain
"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," adds Parul Mishra, Vice President of Product Management, Digital Labour 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 new tool is the outcome of the strategic collaboration between Dun & Bradstreet and IBM, it combines IBM's AI and data platform and consulting services with Dun & Bradstreet's supply chain expertise and vast sets of trusted data to help organisations responsibly expand their use of generative AI.
Leveraging IBM watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai can aid enterprises in their quest to 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-fuelled 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.
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