Telmo Felix

Tell us about your educational and professional background and how you came to D&B.

I’m originally from a small village in Portugal. I went to Lisbon to study computer science. There, I got involved in the open-source community and was a founding member of the Portuguese Linux community. We had meetings where people like Richard Stallman and Alan Cox — two of the most well-known developers of Linux — attended. So I was always interested in the creative aspects of open source.

I started working while in college in Portugal. This was during the internet boom, and I did what is today called full stack development — working on everything from the back-end to the front-end on websites and in e-commerce. Around 2005, I brought mobile development to my then-employer which was extremely new at the time. Around that time, I was finding opportunities limited in Portugal, so I joined D&B and moved to Ireland about 15 years ago. 

You’ve been listed on several patent applications,^1,2 including one covering Prime, an integral data processing application at D&B. How did you end up working on that?

Initially I was working mostly on web development here on DNBi and similar applications. But I was always more of a data and back-end developer, so that’s when I got onto a team that experimented and created a proof of concept to gather all our data in one place, ensure its consistency, and render it product-ready. This proof of concept eventually turned into Prime and resulted in 2 granted patent families. We were very much ahead of time on things like the data lake concept, where you bring all data sources into one place and choose from there. 

You worked on ChatD&B — our GenAI chat assistant – how did you get involved with GenAI development?

After Prime was developed, I left D&B for a while and explored other companies for about 6–7 years. During that time, I was involved in different projects from data processing to healthcare to hardware. The opportunity arose to return to D&B in a research and development role, which is where I work now. As part of our research two years ago, we explored what the D&B take on GenAI would be, and that exploration resulted in ChatD&B: the agent that can interact with D&B data. Again, we were very early adopters of that when we started getting our agents to work and to interact with D&B data. I think that's one of the things that we innovated: How can you interact in a conversational way with structured data? We’re now patent-pending on that concept.