By Napthali Ranasinghe
A new era of technical innovation has been brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of this revolution.
Business Analyst (BA) role has evolved significantly over the years. Even now, BAs are still referred to as requirement elicitors, data interpreters, and documenters. The field of business analysis has seen significant change since the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). AI is no longer just a buzzword in the field of business analysis; instead, it is revolutionizing the way business analysts grow and operate the businesses.
The new AI trends and tools and their impact on business analysts has been discussed below.
AI trends
The application of technical advancements to improve decision-making, expedite processes and forecast future trends has always been at the forefront of AI.
AI-driven predictive analytics is a key trend enabling BAs to analyze trends and predict market changes in real-time. Data is a key foundation for business analysis. Data-driven insights are critical for understanding consumers, markets, and industry dynamics, empowering quick and informed decision-making to minimize risks and to seize opportunities. In today’s customer-centric era, personalization is crucial for business differentiation. AI is instrumental in business analysis, allowing businesses to personalize customer interactions by analyzing preferences, behaviors, and engagement patterns. This enables tailored marketing campaigns and hyper-personalized product recommendations, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Adopting AI trends as leaders and practitioners in business analysis will open up novel opportunities for success and promote efficiency, growth, and innovation.
AI tools
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has given rise to strong AI tools that could assist Business Analysts universally to make better decisions out of available data and in the end, to provide better solutions. Many effective AI tools enable business analysts to extract more valuable information from unstructured data, streamline difficult tasks, spot risks, and enhance team and stakeholder decision making.
The following are few AI tools that business analysts can utilize:
· Modern Requirements — Is among the most widely used tools for managing requirements and it offers an analysis of collaboration requirements.
· Tableau — An effective business intelligence platform for data visualization that enables interaction, analysis, and presentation of data in an understandable and visually appealing way.
· ChatGPT — According to data facts, the most popular and widely used AI tool in the world, which is used to gather and analyze requirements, model processes and data, identify and specify information about functional specifications, build and deconstruct user cases.
· Power BI — A complete analytics platform which provides simple data collection, examination and visualization data from several sources, hence streamlining the process of extracting insights.
· Claude AI — An emerging AI tool, which excels in summarization, Q&A, decision-making, code-writing and many more. Also, it allows the uploading of text files and images to provide context for input prompts.
Conclusion
In summary, artificial intelligence (AI) is a revolutionary force in the realm of business analysis, not merely a passing trend. The capacity to successfully incorporate AI tools and trends into business analysis processes will be a crucial differentiator for companies as we move through 2024 and beyond. Therefore, business analysts need to embrace this shift and modify their approaches and abilities to fully utilize AI, making sure that this technology is used in an accurate, creative, and ethical manner.