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SDLC in the AI Era
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Business Analyst

AI drafts requirements; you add context and catch subtle errors

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How your work changes

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Open any item to see before and now, with sources.

Risks to watch

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Skills to build

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Human skills: what's new, what matters more, and what AI now does for you.

New skillsDidn't really exist in the role before
  • Writing reusable domain and architecture context for AI assistants
  • Prompting for stories, acceptance criteria and edge cases
  • Checking AI rewrites against what the stakeholder actually meant
  • Writing specifications a coding agent can follow
  • Knowing what project data may go into which AI tool
More important nowExisting skills that AI makes more valuable
  • Stakeholder facilitation and validation
  • Domain knowledge and business rules
  • Critical review of requirements quality
  • Non-functional and regulatory requirements
  • Working closely with QA and developers
Less centralStill useful, but AI now does much of it
  • Typing up meeting notes by hand
  • Formatting requirements documents from scratch
  • Writing routine stories and test cases from a blank page

Tools

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"Start here" tools are the editor's pick of where to begin for this role. Our suggestion

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Your first steps

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A week in this role now

A typical week still revolves around people: workshops, interviews and sessions to confirm what was agreed. What changes is the paperwork around them. A transcribed workshop gives you a first set of notes to correct instead of a blank page. A rough epic becomes a draft list of stories and acceptance criteria quickly, and you spend your time on what is missing, wrong or invented. Before any of that works well, you give the assistant a solid description of the domain, and you keep it up to date.

The judgement part of the job grows. You check that a neatly reworded requirement still means what the stakeholder said, and you add the non-functional, regulatory and edge-case detail that drafts tend to skip. You also think about who reads your output next. That may be a tester generating cases from your stories, or a developer handing your spec to a coding agent. Vague requirements used to get sorted out in conversation. Now they are more likely to be built exactly as written.

Agent Skills

AI instructions to copy

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Each one is a text file (SKILL.md) that tells an AI tool, step by step, how to do one task the way you want. Copy it into a chat, or add it to a tool that supports Agent Skills. Which tools, and how

Starter instructions for this role

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Written from the changes above. Read and adapt one before you use it.

Published skills you can reuse(3)From public skill catalogs. Check the license before use.

Related roles

Sources (7)

4 research papers, 2 vendor pages, 1 practitioner article · 3 vendor-affiliated

Each source is labelled by what the page is and whether its publisher sells in this space. How we label sources

  1. 1.
    AI for Requirements Engineering: Industry adoption and Practitioner perspectives(opens in new tab)

    arXiv (Rani, Berntsson Svensson, Feldt; ISE 2025 workshop at ASE 2025) · 5 November 2025

    Research paper

    “Our data show that 58.2% of respondents already use AI in RE, and 69.1% view its impact as positive or very positive. HAIC dominates practice, accounting for 54.4% of all RE techniques, while full AI automation remains minimal at 5.4%.”
  2. 2.
    Supporting Stakeholder Requirements Expression with LLM Revisions: An Empirical Evaluation(opens in new tab)

    arXiv (Mircea, Gevrek, Schmid, Schneider; REFSQ 2026) · 23 January 2026

    Research paper

  3. 3.
    Can LLMs Generate User Stories and Assess Their Quality?(opens in new tab)

    arXiv (Quattrocchi, Pasquale, Spoletini, Baresi) · 20 July 2025

    Research paper

  4. 4.
    Using AI for requirements analysis: A case study(opens in new tab)

    Thoughtworks · 17 September 2024

    Vendor pageVendor-affiliated

    “the team estimates that there was a reduction in analysis time of ~20%, despite the time required to create the context.”
  5. 5.
    Can we use generative AI to generate test cases from user stories?(opens in new tab)

    Thoughtworks · 30 July 2025

    Vendor pageVendor-affiliated

    “The AI achieved 98.67% acceptance criteria coverage and maintained a low duplication rate of only 4.22%.”
  6. 6.
    Generative AI for Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review(opens in new tab)

    arXiv (Cheng et al.) · 14 October 2025

    Research paper

    “Industrial adoption remains nascent, with over 90% of studies corresponding to early stage development and only 1.3% reaching production level integration.”
  7. 7.
    Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl(opens in new tab)

    martinfowler.com (Birgitta Böckeler) · 15 October 2025

    PractitionerVendor-affiliated