Key Takeaways
- Using pre-linked datasets from multiple providers eliminates one of the biggest bottlenecks in data enrichment – saving you significant time, resources, and ongoing maintenance.
- The Precisely + Dun & Bradstreet partnership unlocks a powerful combination of business and location intelligence.
- Connected data supports AI readiness. Data Link helps organizations build a robust, connected foundation that powers better AI outcomes.
There’s a challenge that we’re constantly hearing from data teams: how do you build a foundation of truly connected data without spending all your time and resources on linking it up and maintaining it?
Organizations understand the value of enriching their first-party data with external datasets. They know they need business intelligence, location context, demographic data, risk attributes – often from multiple providers. What they struggle with is the “how.” The integrations, the mapping, the ongoing maintenance as data changes over time. In many cases, the cost and complexity of connecting the data from multiple providers rivals the cost of licensing it in the first place.
That’s exactly the problem we set out to tackle with our Data Link program. To dive deeper into how Data Link helps organizations across industries tackle these challenges, I was recently joined by Jay Daly, a Strategist at Dun & Bradstreet – one of our trusted Data Link partners.
What are the Challenges of Combining Data From Multiple Providers?
It’s not that organizations don’t know which data they need. They do. The challenge is operationalizing it, especially when that data comes from different providers with different ID systems, different update schedules, and different formats.
Think about what it takes to bring in a new external dataset. You need to:
- Evaluate it
- Assess its quality and completeness
- Go through procurement
- Integrate it with your existing records
- And crucially, keep it current as the data evolves
Do that across two or three vendors simultaneously, and just maintaining the linkages between datasets will eat up all bandwidth while incurring a ton of overhead, let alone actually use the data.
And the scale problem is real. The larger your organization and the longer your time horizon, the more this compounds. Businesses change. Addresses change. Formats get updated. If you’re trying to maintain those connections manually, you’re fighting a losing battle.
How Are Precisely and Dun & Bradstreet Solving This?
“If you don’t have the data that you need, you are at an extreme competitive disadvantage. Dun & Bradstreet and Precisely are both companies who are trying to ensure that our joint customers have the data that they need, so that they are leading rather than following.”
Dun & Bradstreet has been in the business of making sense of the world’s business data for over 180 years. Their process of collecting data globally, syncing it to a single entity record, cleansing it, and enriching it with proprietary models, produces something uniquely valuable: the D-U-N-S® Number. It’s a globally recognized, persistent identifier tied to a specific business entity, and it’s the foundation of trusted business data worldwide.
At Precisely, we’ve taken a similar approach with location data. Our unique identifiers are persistent and attached to addresses, parcels, buildings, and street segments — giving organizations a reliable anchor for location-based insights across everything from property data to demographics to risk attributes.
Traditionally organizations would have to manually match and link our datasets together, as data providers across the industry haven’t historically designed their ID systems to be interoperable with other providers.
So here’s the question we asked ourselves: what if our ID systems were pre-linked? What would that unlock for our customers?
What Is Data Link? How Does it Create Connected Data Without the Integration Complexity?
Data Link is a Precisely partner program and connectivity solution. At its core, it pre-links datasets from leading data providers via unique IDs so that combining them is as simple as a column join.
Rather than asking each organization to build and maintain the bridges between vendor datasets themselves, Data Link moves that work upstream to the data providers who know their ID systems best. The links are established, validated, and maintained on our end, so by the time the data reaches you, the hard work is done.
For organizations using both Dun & Bradstreet and Precisely data, this means the connection between a D-U-N-S Number and the corresponding Precisely location identifiers is already there, ready to use.
You can bring in firmographic data like revenue, employee count, credit risk, and industry classification, and immediately marry it to address data, property attributes, demographic context, or risk scores. No cumbersome integration project or ongoing maintenance required.
The benefits are tangible:
- Faster time-to-value. When your data team isn’t spending weeks on integration, they can focus on the actual use cases driving your business forward.
- Lower costs. You’re cutting the overhead traditionally associated with onboarding and maintaining data from multiple vendors.
- More room to innovate. With the plumbing handled, you can move quickly to test hypotheses, build products, and tackle new use cases.
What are the Use Cases for Connected Data?
We covered a few compelling use cases in the webinar.
Territory management and customer engagement is a great example of where Precisely and Dun & Bradstreet datasets naturally complement each other.
From the Precisely side, you might bring in boundary data to define territories, demographic data to understand spending behavior, and property details to characterize commercial locations. Dun & Bradstreet layers on top of that with firmographic context: who the business is, what they do, who owns them, and whether they’re already in your portfolio.
As Jay put it, Dun & Bradstreet data also helps you identify white space within existing accounts, and flag the companies you probably shouldn’t be pursuing at all: “Being able to use Dun & Bradstreet to identify those [companies], target those, and pull those out from the selling process can significantly reduce the amount of wasted time on the sales organization, which nobody can afford today.”
Together, you’re able to put your sales teams in front of the right opportunities and avoid chasing ones that aren’t a fit.
Underwriting and risk assessment is another area where this combination is particularly powerful. Insurance underwriting is inherently location-centric. You need accurate geocoding, property details, building characteristics, and external risk factors.
But understanding the business occupying that property, their financial history, and the risk profile of neighboring businesses is equally critical. As Jay noted, that’s where adjacency really matters: “You start talking about chemical storage, things like that that could be nearby — that would impact your underwriting exercise. Definitely changes the risk.”
And then there’s the real-world example we shared of a top-three U.S. telco using Data Link to support a fiber expansion initiative. They were using Precisely data for master address records and Dun & Bradstreet data to understand business demand in target markets, but those datasets were fragmented. With Data Link, they were able to connect those records immediately and execute the fiber rollout far more efficiently, and at scale, across the country.
Is Your Data AI-Ready? Here’s Why Connected Data Is the Answer.
One question we received in the webinar was about AI: Does this partnership support AI initiatives, and how?
The short answer is yes, and that’s central to why Data Link matters right now.
AI systems, and agentic AI workflows in particular, require complete, connected, accurate foundational data. It goes beyond a “garbage in, garbage out” concern to a completeness concern. If your AI agent doesn’t have enough context to reason from, it can’t produce reliable recommendations. Fragmented, siloed data from disparate providers is one of the biggest barriers to AI readiness.
Data Link addresses this directly. By providing a pre-linked, interoperable foundation of data from across leading data providers, it gives AI systems the rich context they need to operate effectively.
As Jay explained: “The end result is that the solution, from an AI standpoint, now offers much more robust data — not just Dun & Bradstreet, not just Precisely, but the ability to, in an agentic workflow, combine it all.”
Beyond the data itself, there’s a workforce dimension to this too. The data professionals who would have spent weeks building and maintaining these linkages can now redirect that effort toward higher-value AI work. Data Link gives AI better data, and frees up the people building AI systems to actually focus on building them.
A Living, Expanding Ecosystem
There’s much more to look forward to with Data Link. It’s an expanding ecosystem, and we’re actively bringing in new partners. Shovels, a leading provider of building permit and contractor intelligence data, , connecting over 150 million permits to the data ecosystem. This has significant implications for risk assessment, lead generation and contractor matching, and site selection and expansion planning.
Like Dun & Bradstreet and Shovels, every new partner that joins strengthens the network and expands what’s possible for our joint customers. The goal is a data ecosystem where interoperability is the default.
Ready to See What Data Link Can Do for You?
Whether you’re already using Precisely data, Dun & Bradstreet data, or both, there’s likely untapped value in the connection between them. And if you’re evaluating external data for the first time, Data Link provides an ideal starting point with pre-validated, pre-linked datasets without the traditional integration complexity.
The webinar made clear that organizations are ready for this. The questions we got were sharp, specific, and practical – about AI readiness, data maintenance, delivery methods, entity resolution. These are real challenges that data teams are dealing with every day.
Connected data is a foundation that faster insights, lower integration costs, and AI-ready workflows are all built on.
DataLink is designed to help with exactly that. Learn more in the on-demand webinar: Dun & Bradstreet + Precisely: Connected Data for Better Business Outcomes and on our Data Link page.
