Gen AI in the world of Business Analysis

I will have to begin this article by stating the date I’m writing it. It is the 23rd of May 2024. Why am I doing this? Well, this is a field that is advancing at such an incredible pace that these thoughts may well be obsolete before the end of the year.

Now we’ve got that out of the way I’ll start getting into the thought that most of us have been thinking followed by some ideas of how we as Business Analysts can embrace this emerging new world.

Will Gen AI take my job?

The big one. We’ve all thought it. It’s very easy to hear about this new technology and be worried about their livelihood. The answer; well, it depends. Are you adaptable? If you can answer ‘yes’, then you shouldn’t have too many worries.

The reason being, as an adaptable BA you will be able to use Gen AI to enhance your work and improve your productivity. At the same time, as good as the Gen AI is, it is unable to take the wealth of contextual information that we use when identifying requirements. The small things, like body language, tone of voice, random document that hasn’t been stored centrally; if it isn’t in the database the Gen AI uses, then it is flying blind. Of course we can also end up flying blind ourselves but we are often far more conscious of this and try to account for it.

There is still the risk that some companies will try to take shortcuts and use Gen AI to write their requirements. I can see this potentially working in very small teams that are practising true Agile development where everyone is in constant communication and silos haven’t formed yet. For any larger organisation that has managed to develop silos or is simply to large for everyone to be able to speak to each other regularly (or at all), a Gen AI replacement for a BA is more likely to run into the troubles I mentioned earlier.

The other risk to BA jobs is not from all out replacement but from the efficiencies we gain, companies will be left with fewer BAs that are being supported by the Gen AI assistants. I think this is where my point of ‘are you adaptable’ comes into play; if you can become the BA that works well with Gen AI, then you’ll be the BA that is retained during cost cutting exercises.

The Possibilities

Provided you liked the previous section and I didn’t upset you, then you will probably also be quite excited about the possibilities posed by Gen AI.

Coverage prompt: Once you’ve built your requirement work item, Gen AI can be run over it to check for coverage against the wider requirement set.

Faster creation: Bullet points can quickly be converted into properly formatted requirements very quickly by Gen AI. You then simply need to review and ensure they still have the same meaning before the AI reformatted them.

Research assistant: Been given a tonne of data. Nothing sorts through large quantities of data and presents it back concisely with as little effort as Gen AI. Do remember to ask for citations so you can double check the summary but you will still have saved days, maybe weeks, so the small amount of time confirming those citations is a small ask.

Content creation: As a matter of principle I’m not writing any of my articles with the assistance of Gen AI (these are supposed to be my own thoughts after all). However, I am not against using Gen AI at work to help build engaging workshop invitations and agendas. Why spend 20 minutes crafting the perfect event invite or email when you can give the inputs to Gen AI, get the output and review it within 5 minutes.

Persona creation: If you work with personas Gen AI is a great shortcut tool. Typically the process involves waiting days or weeks to conduct a couple of hour interview, summarise and reformat it into a persona (while praying that you didn’t forget to ask any questions). With Gen AI you can put the assistant into a persona and interview it, then it is simply a case of validating your persona with the customer (or maybe a friendly Product Manager that knows their customers well). Not only do you save a lot of time, you can easily go back to the assistant to ask any questions you missed.

A bit of guidance: There is also the potential for guidance for BAs. I have built my own BA bot (who is lurking on the bottom right of your screen if you're on desktop/laptop or can be found in the menu bar for those on mobile) which is focussed on BA answers and techniques trained solely on the content I produce. Eventually it will become a knowledgebase of everything I have learned and committed to documenting which I hope will be of use to future generations of Business Analysts, on-demand and faster at typing then I am in real life.

Summary

In this article we’ve looked at Gen AI, at least briefly and based on the current level of development which is going to change (probably quite quickly).

Hopefully you are feeling both reassured and also optimistic about Gen AI and how you can use it to optimise your workload. By embracing the possibilities of this technology you can become the BA that works with Gen AI and doesn’t suffer it.