AI with Purpose: How D&B Is Guiding Businesses Through the AI Shift

By the time AI reached the top of many businesses’ to-do list, Dun & Bradstreet had been embedding artificial intelligence into core operations for years — streamlining data management, sharpening analytics, and powering smarter business decisions. So when the demand for AI-powered business solutions surged, Dun & Bradstreet found itself in a position to expand its mission: arming businesses with data to drive performance — now with new AI technology and custom applications. 

“We’ve been at the forefront in many instances,” Chief Data and Analytics Officer Gary Kotovets said on the Technovation podcast in May. 

Consider Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud management process for corporate contact information that customers leverage for sales outreach. 

“When you have 600 million businesses on file, you have exponentially more contacts that work in those businesses,” Kotovets said. “Managing that information on a frequent basis becomes very challenging. That’s where our large language models come in. We use large language models to extract a lot of that information out of those sources.” 

For example, large language models can autofill a corporate officer’s email address based on the domain names of other company employees.   

“Those are the types of capabilities that we have been using for a long time internally,” Kotovets said. 

In his view, the launch of user-facing Generative AI (Gen AI) like ChatGPT about three years ago ignited the demand for AI-innovation across industries. While AI systems can mimic human intelligence by responding to a particular set of inputs, Gen AI goes a step further, using its training data as the basis to create something new.  But for many businesses, the problem lay in knowing how to harness it. 

“Back then, nobody really had a lot of ideas,” Kotovets said.  

As technology has raced ahead, many organizations are still playing catch-up. A December 2024 Dun & Bradstreet survey showed 88% of businesses were implementing or planning to implement AI, while only a quarter of businesses had actually deployed new AI solutions.  

Dun & Bradstreet has stepped up to meet the demand for AI-driven business solutions in two ways: collaborating with customers to build custom AI capabilities and creating its own Gen AI capabilities.  

In 2023, the company launched D&B.AI Labs, allowing clients to co-develop custom solutions in parallel exploration to Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary data and analytics and its ongoing application of AI, including Gen AI.   

Among the biggest roadblocks to successful AI implementation cited in the Dun & Bradstreet survey were trusted business data (reported by 33.5% of respondents), ethical and regulatory challenges (33.5%), and internal subject matter expertise (30.9%). D&B.AI Labs is situated to help customers will all three pain points. 

Customers can incorporate Dun & Bradstreet’s trusted business datasets with large language models (LLMs) that have been validated by D&B.  In some cases, customers’ data can also be incorporated.  

“We have created a cyber, legal, ethical, and governance framework around these capabilities,” Kotovets said. “We share that with our customers to make sure that they understand that every new datapoint that we decide to incorporate into large language models and every capability that we build goes through that review process.” 

The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation’s responsible AI program is governed in coordination with its AI Governance Council, which brings together expertise from leaders across the business responsible for regulatory affairs, compliance and ethics, cybersecurity, data governance, data science, intellectual property, product, and sustainability. Earlier this year, the company received TrustArc’s TRUSTe Responsible AI Certification, which requires confirmation that the company’s AI is valid and reliable, explainable and interpretable, accountable and transparent, privacy-enhanced, fair, safe, and secure and resilient. 

Leveraging AI to Drive Efficiency 

In addition to custom AI solutions, Dun & Bradstreet also serves customers with a mix of “off-the-shelf” AI capabilities and AI capabilities built internally. 

For example, a customer can buy a Dun & Bradstreet Gen AI “agent” that can autonomously perform entity resolution and combine it with an agent that performs other tasks, such as crawling the web, to create a proprietary, seamless workflow to fit their business needs. 

“I'm seeing a lot of compartmentalization of these different tools and agents that could be combined together into a more singular workflow,” Kotovets said. 

According to Kotovets, that approach is typically taken by enterprise organizations who want to build AI themselves.  

“The midsize to small customer would still want things ‘out-of-the-box’ to just solve their particular needs,” he said. “We're trying to balance on both sides and really serve both sides of the spectrum of our customer base.”  

Internally, Dun & Bradstreet has enhanced its sales intelligence solution, D&B Hoovers, with Gen AI features to streamline client outreach. Gen AI assistant ChatD&B, also launched in 2024, with new updated features and data sets released throughout 2025, helps customers access data on companies and professional contacts instantaneously — think of the conversational, Q&A format of ChatGPT but for retrieving business data, such as firmographic, linkage, financial and operational risks, principals and contacts, and events. 

“Our goal is to make it easy for companies of all sizes to traverse our data blocks and use ChatD&B to get the information they need faster,” Kotovets said. 

While working with customers to unlock their AI opportunities, Dun & Bradstreet is also encouraging its own workforce to leverage responsible AI in their workflows. An internal survey of Dun & Bradstreet team members conducted earlier this year found nearly 60% are using AI to enrich their work, with more than a third of respondents reporting increased efficiency — including from ChatD&B. 

For Data Operations Analyst Catriona Lynch, ChatD&B has reduced the time it takes to gather account information for a global telecom client by more than 78%. 

“Before ChatD&B, I would…pull out each of the elements that the client wanted, so basically copying and pasting each of the company name, the trading address, etc. into my response. Now, I simply provide the list of required elements into ChatD&B, and I get a response for all of them within seconds,” Lynch said.