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A frequently asked question is “can business analysts be replaced by artificial intelligence? Will be role be automated?”

The case against being replaced…

Business analyst is a role where you are the mediator between multiple teams and clients often with conflicting stories, priorities and business rules. BAs are part of the whole project cycle. BA role has a lot of real life decision making requirements and contextual understanding which cannot be automated by an AI.

As such, BAs won’t be automated until we have AI that is near distinguishable from humans. When an AI can understand Karen’s insane accounting spreadsheet and the internal business rules that seemingly conflict with each other constantly, then we’re doomed, but until that point it will always be easier to have a person talk to a person to understand.

What about learning and implementing automation?

Now that’s an interesting one! Yes, there is a high likelihood over the next few years that more roles and processes will engage in automation, and as a BA it’s likely you could be on one of those major projects.

There are lot of candidates for AI and automation, and whilst they are not able to handle the sufficient context required to drive all business decisions (yet), there are more actions being automated daily. Examples include accounting/payroll, tax evaluation, some legal documentation, code deployments, basic customer interactions like resetting passwords or taking sales/orders, monitoring, warehousing, etc.

The way you need to frame it is that “No one is losing their jobs, our goal is to remove the low-value menial boring tasks from your day, to free you up so you can work on something better”.

Of course, sometimes the work does lead to retrenchment… For that, beyond offering condolences, it’s tough to provide solace to people losing their jobs, but hopefully the organisation provides retraining and redeployment opportunities for those impacted. If this hasn’t been raised in your project, worth highlighting and addressing.

Stefan Carton

Updated: 2/08/2022