BA.AI

Have you used Copilot?

Are you using ChatGPT?

Do you utilise Manus?

Have you tried Lovable?

The need to use artificial intelligence today is more and more presenting itself as an urgent need. We, as business analysts, have to use AI tools to improve our efficiency and the quality of our work.

To do that, skills like prompt engineering have made their way in the training curriculum of BAs across the world, while a constant pressure to show that you use AI tools is making everyone participate in this gold rush without putting much thinking into the how (let alone the why).

Just go out there, open Copilot and start typing!

Create agents and start training them!

Show results!

Site y efficiency gains!

And as in the gold rush in Klondike, the people who profit more are not the ones seeking gold but the ones selling the tools. Back then it was about shovels, but now it is about subscriptions and use credits.

But even if the tools are now available and we can do anything with AI, the big need still remains: To define what to do with these tools!

And by this I do not refer to decide whether to create a diagram in BPMN 2.0 or to generate a list of user stories with acceptance criteria in Gherkin language. I refer to the actual essence of the generated output of these tools.

How will this output generate value for the customer? How will it help the client fulfil their vision. How it is helping innovation?

Once upon a time that was the work of a business analyst. To act as an advisor to the customer and… advice! Provide insights on how the customer should have new paths into the unknown. How to tackle competition, how to be disruptive, how to place themselves into a constantly changing market.

But then came the tools. The methodologies. The certifications.

And today most business analysts are people who know dozens of tools and ways of working, waiting for customer feedback to generate perfect artifacts and nice ppts. But lacking deep knowledge of the field they are working in. Working in projects that soon end, ready to jump into the next. JIRA, Confluence, SharePoint, Azure, FIGMA, CoPilot, ChatGPT, the list of endless and constantly evolving. And new certifications also arise. And CVs grow in length. But not depth…

The advent of AI will change that: mundane work will be taken over by the AI tools so business analysts will have to focus on the thing that truly made business analysts useful: Advisory services based on deep knowledge of the field.

That is good. Analysts will learn again the core value of being an analyst. They will stop just shoveling in the dirt where they tell us to shovel, but they will guide customers once more on where to go to find gold.

AI will render business analysts useless for many of the things they do today. Only to help them discover again why they were needed in the first place…

So go on you great explorer!

Wear your shoes.

Your fancy jacket.

Get your gear.

All these are useless.

Without a compass to tell you where to go!