Business Analyst & AI Exercises
Fill in the blanks to test your knowledge.
The most significant change AI has made to the BA role is compressing the ___ layer, shifting time toward judgment and stakeholder work
Before AI: 50% of BA time spent on work — formatting, transcribing, drafting.
After AI: 20% on work — AI drafts first.
New focus: judgment, validation, and stakeholder relationship management.
When AI generates a requirements document, the most dangerous failure mode is a ___ requirement — something the AI invented that was never discussed with stakeholders
A requirement looks real but was never discussed with stakeholders.
Detection: can each requirement be traced back to a stakeholder statement?
Prevention: review AI output against your elicitation notes and transcripts.
When asking Claude.ai to test assumptions in a requirements document, the instruction "don't be ___" produces the most useful, thorough analysis
Prompt: "Act as a skeptical business analyst. Identify every gap, conflict, and unstated assumption. Be specific, reference requirement numbers, and don't be .
Output a numbered list of concerns per category."
Rationale: AI defaults to a balanced, diplomatic tone — you want exhaustive critique, not balanced coverage.
The BA validation check that asks "can each requirement be traced back to a specific stakeholder statement?" is called ___ traceability
traceability: each requirement links to a stakeholder statement.
Completeness: all elicited requirements are present.
Conflict preservation: ambiguous items are flagged, not silently resolved.
Apply this checklist after every AI-generated requirements artifact.
The analysis that compares stakeholder interview notes across multiple groups to find conflicts, unique requirements, and missing areas is called cross-___ gap analysis
Cross- gap analysis compares synthesis notes from multiple stakeholder group interviews.
It finds: requirements shared by all groups (consensus), requirements unique to one group (needs validation), conflicts between groups, and missing business areas.
AI advantage: minutes vs. hours for manual cross-transcript comparison.
A document that presents both stakeholder positions neutrally with trade-offs and the specific questions the decision-maker must answer is a conflict ___ document
A conflict document contains:
- A neutral statement of each position with supporting rationale
- Business impact of each option (quantified)
- A compromise option addressing both core concerns
- Specific questions the executive must answer to resolve the conflict
The BA's role: neutral facilitator, not an advocate for either side.
The BA performance metric that measures how often requirements change after sign-off — a proxy for elicitation quality — is called requirements ___
Requirements measures how often requirements change after sign-off — a direct proxy for elicitation quality.
Other meaningful metrics: defect origin (% of production bugs tracing to requirements ambiguity) and stakeholder satisfaction with requirements clarity.
Replace: artifact volume — the number of documents or stories produced.
In the AI era, the BA capability that multiplies all other AI benefits — enabling better prompts, faster error detection, and stakeholder trust that generalists cannot earn — is ___ depth
depth — deep expertise in a specific business field — is the multiplier capability in the AI era.
Domain knowledge leads to more precise AI prompts, faster hallucination detection, and stakeholder trust that generalists cannot earn.
Investment: go deeper in your primary domain — this compounds over time.