Introducing D&B Ask Procurement™, a new AI assistant designed to accelerate procurement and supplier risk decisions

Procurement professionals today face a complex and rapidly evolving landscape, balancing the need for cost efficiency, supply chain resilience, and strategic decision-making. The pressure to source the right suppliers, negotiate favorable terms, and maintain strong vendor relationships—all while managing an overwhelming amount of data—can be daunting. With the advancement of generative AI-powered assistants and agents, procurement teams can streamline access to data, improve decision-making, boost productivity, and unlock new opportunities for cost savings.

Dun & Bradstreet and IBM are excited to announce the general availability of D&B Ask Procurement, a generative AI assistant designed to enable procurement professionals to accelerate the discovery and analysis of supply chain risks and opportunities. Connected to Dun & Bradstreet’s global-leading business risk, financial, and firmographic data and insights, and powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate® and IBM watsonx™ AI, D&B Ask Procurement helps teams to query critical supplier insights, expedite analysis and reporting, and identify suppliers for engagement.

D&B Ask Procurement enables accelerated access to trusted data and critical insights throughout the procurement and sourcing process, providing procurement teams with:

Powered by Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud, containing over 580 million public and private entities around the globe, D&B Ask Procurement provides a conversational chat experience enabling users to quickly and easily access data concerning existing or potential supplier risks, financials, ESG, beneficial ownership, legal filings and events, and more. Procurement users are equipped with real-time insights for more informed and strategic decision-making.

Connected to global-leading business insights from Dun & Bradstreet and built on IBM watsonx Orchestrate, Ask Procurement provides a quick and easy way to help accelerate multi-step analysis. It calculates answers to complex questions allowing for quicker and more intelligent decision making faster than ever before.

Leveraging Ask Procurement enables procurement teams to optimize supplier selection, identify cost-saving opportunities through predictive analytics, and reduce the risks associated with procurement, such as supplier disruptions or contract compliance issues, helping organizations achieve better financial outcomes.

D&B Ask Procurement is powered by IBM watsonx Orchestrate and watsonx.ai technology with an agentic AI framework to provide advanced reasoning capabilities and autonomous decision making. In addition to utilizing Dun & Bradstreet data, organizations can incorporate their own data and insights such as spend and purchase order history, into Ask Procurement based on their own involvement with suppliers. With a conversational chat user experience, procurement professionals can employ Ask Procurement to calculate analysis requiring numerous data outputs, generate risk summaries based on key findings, and compare suppliers’ attributes, taking manual analysis from hours to seconds.

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