With AI Agents & Automation capable of writing requirements and creating user stories, I'm worried about the future of the BA role. Should we be focusing more on prompt engineering and agent orchestration to stay relevant in the next few years?
3 answers
The role isn't disappearing; it’s evolving. I spent most of 2023 integrating AI Agents & Automation into our requirements gathering phase. Instead of spending weeks in meetings, I use an agent to ingest 100+ pages of stakeholder documents and highlight contradictions. This allows me to spend more time on "Value Analysis"—actually figuring out if the requested feature will drive revenue. You definitely need to learn how to prompt and manage these agents, but the core BA skill of "bridging the gap between business and tech" is more valuable than ever.
Do you find that stakeholders are comfortable with agents summarizing their needs, or do they still want that face-to-face time?
Learning to orchestrate agents is the best career move I've made lately. It’s like having a team of assistants at your fingertips.
Spot on, Lawrence. Those who learn to work with these tools will naturally rise to lead the next generation of digital transformation teams.
Daniel, stakeholders still want the face-to-face connection for the big decisions. However, they love the speed at which I can now turn around a draft of the PRD. I use AI Agents & Automation to do the heavy lifting of the first draft, and then I walk through it with them for final approval. It makes our meetings much more efficient and focused on solving actual problems.