Mastering AI for Business Analysts (2025): Top Tools/Techniques
Arunabh Satpathy- August 5, 2024
- Reading Time: 5 Minutes
Companies are now increasingly harnessing AI tools for business analysis. Deploying generative AI for business analysis will be the key differentiator between mediocre and high performing teams. A study shows that AI technologies enable business professionals to produce 59% more business documents in an hour than before.
For this reason, selecting the right AI tool for business analysis is crucial. In this post, you will explore how Business Analysts (BA’s) can effectively use AI tools, identify the tools that are best for business analysis, and address some commonly asked questions about AI – including whether AI will take away BA jobs (hint: it won’t).
1. How can a Business Analyst use AI tools?
Business analysts play a multifaceted role in today’s enterprises. They identify business needs through data collection and analysis and thus bridge the gap between IT and business. Some of their tasks include creating requirements, strategic planning, business model analysis, process design, and more.
This wide range of skills is why BAs will greatly benefit from integrating AI into their workflow.
Among the tasks mentioned above, BAs play a role in process automation, internal communications, data aggregation, and idea generation. Here are some specific ways AI tools can increase BA productivity for these (and other) tasks:
Surfacing and Explaining Findings Within Data
- Requirements Analysis: AI tools can improve the quality of requirements writing by ranking work items on writing quality scales like the 6Cs: context, content, clarity, consistency, completeness, and conclusion.
Business efficiency is greatly enhanced by the 6C’s analysis capability, which streamlines the analysis procedure. Teams can save time by doing this and concentrate on other important work. By guaranteeing that the team considers all factors, AI analysis helps users make better and more informed judgments.
Teams can also prioritize requirements using AI analysis, which can rank requirements using frameworks like SWOT and INVEST.
Gleaning Insights from Data
- Holistic Analysis: AI allows for comprehensive analysis beyond traditional metrics. For instance, BAs may need to find out whether a given set of features match compliance standards. For instance, a BA can compare a large set of features for a product documented in work items and ASPICE compliance regulations.
- New Insights: Machine learning helps uncover previously unconsidered factors. For example, a BA in a finance firm can use AI to reveal a correlation between complex weather patterns and clothing purchases to aid sales forecasting.
Vetting Business Impact and Project Feasibility
- AI Exploration: Analysts can use AI to identify and evaluate promising use cases. For instance, Sephora’s use case enhanced their Virtual Artist tool with AI, enabling customers to virtually test makeup and get tailored beauty suggestions.
- Strategic Decisions: In strategic decision-making, AI helps BAs evaluate the viability of future projects. For instance, a healthcare software company can crunch data to enable business analysts to find new business cases.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: Business Analysts can assess the investment worthiness of AI initiatives before implementation. For example, some traders can use AI models to outperform the S&P 500, over a three-year analysis period.
2. Which AI Tools are Best for Business Analysis?
AI tools for business analysts differ greatly, reflecting the diverse skills and tasks BAs handle. Here are the top AI tools for Business Analysts:
i. Copilot4DevOps
Copilot4DevOps is a game-changing assistant for business analysts natively built into Azure DevOps. It helps streamline workflows, automate repetitive tasks, provide insights, improve quality and accelerate projects. With its intuitive interface, even non-technical team members can contribute effectively. It is available at three levels: Lite, Plus, and Ultimate. Copilot4DevOps Lite is available on the Modern Requirements website and comes standard with Modern Requirements4DevOps. To access Plus and Ultimate versions, an upgrade is needed, or they are also available to purchase as standalone options. The difference between Copilot4DevOps Plus and Copilot4DevOps Ultimate is as follows:
| Feature | Copilot4DevOps Lite | Copilot4DevOps Plus | Copilot4DevOps Ultimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elicit | Generate high-quality output from work items, including requirements, bugs, and test cases. | Generate high-quality output from work items, including requirements, bugs, and test cases. | Same functionality as Plus, ensuring comprehensive coverage. |
| Analyze | Evaluate work items using frameworks like 6Cs, INVEST, PABLO, MoSCoW, and SWOT. | Evaluate work items using frameworks like 6Cs, INVEST, PABLO, MoSCoW, and SWOT. | Same as Plus, with enhanced model performance for deeper insights. |
| Impact Assessment | Assess the impact of specific work items, identifying tasks categorized by severity. | Assess the impact of specific work items, identifying tasks categorized by severity. | Same as Plus, with larger context windows for complex impact analysis. |
| Q&A Assistant | Pose questions to refine requirements and enhance coverage. | Pose questions to refine requirements and enhance coverage. | Same as Plus, but with extended token capacity for lengthy, detailed conversations. |
| Convert | Transform requirements into user stories, use cases, or Gherkin format. | Transform requirements into user stories, use cases, or Gherkin format. | Same as Plus, providing cross-stakeholder alignment. |
| Dynamic Prompt | Not Available | Create custom prompts for flexible and efficient result generation. | Same as Plus but optimized for ultimate customization and dynamic workflows. |
| Transform | Not Available | Summarize, paraphrase, or elaborate requirements, and translate them for distributed teams. | Same functionality with additional token capacity for larger documents and translations. |
| Generate | Not Available | Translate work items into pseudocode or test scripts in various languages. | Enhanced model usage for advanced code generation scenarios. |
| Create Codeless App | Not Available | Design and deploy custom apps without coding. | Same as Plus, optimized for rapid application creation at scale. |
| Diagram | Not Available | Not Available | Generate flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and other visuals from natural language prompts. Refine diagrams manually or via prompts. |
| SOP/Document Generator | Not Available | Not Available | Create professional SOPs and documents using prompts and work item references. Export Word, PDF, or work items. |
| Token Quota | 0.5 million/user/month | 15 million tokens per user/month. | 50 million tokens per user/month, expandable upon request. |
| Custom Instructions | Not Available | Modify interactions, select GPT models (4o or 4o Mini). | Includes GPT-o1 Mini model for even more sophisticated responses. |
| Security | Inherits security from OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. | Inherits security from OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. | Same as Plus, ensuring enterprise-grade compliance and privacy. |
With a generous 30-day free trial, Copilot4DevOps Plus is the most affordable AI for business analysts.
ii. Sisense
Sisense offers both low-code and no-code options for data analysis. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create reports and dashboards. Its features provide data analysis, visualization, export, dashboards, and high-volume data handling. It offers a 30-day free trial.
iii. Akkio
Sisense offers both low-code and no-code options for data analysis. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create reports and dashboards. Its features provide data analysis, visualization, export, dashboards, and high-volume data handling. It offers a 30-day free trial.
iv. Google Looker
Sisense offers both low-code and no-code options for data analysis. Its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create reports and dashboards. Its features provide data analysis, visualization, export, dashboards, and high-volume data handling. It offers a 30-day free trial.
v. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an “everything” tool that professionals can use in many different applications. However, it isn’t specifically designed for DevOps professionals like BAs. Its drawbacks include difficult prompting, workflow disconnection, and hard fine-tuning. It also poses some AI security concerns in enterprises.
vi. Tableau
For business analysts, Tableau’s strength is data visualization and dashboards. It is one of the better-known tools for BAs. However, it lacks requirements elicitation and analysis tools.
vii. Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is designed for BAs who want data integration, visualization, and AI analysis tools. It also offers a question-based UI for data exploration.
4. Other Questions That BAs Ask About AI
- Will a Business Analyst be replaced by AI?
Business Analysts who use AI tools can analyze data and surface insights faster but are unlikely to fully replace human expertise. By leveraging continuous learning, company AI-use policies, change management, and putting human decision making at the center, companies can employ highly productive BAs. - How to leverage AI as a Business Analyst?
BAs can leverage AI through requirement creation and analysis, data analysis, pattern detection, visualization and more when making strategic decisions.
5. What Is the Future of Business Analysis With AI?
The future of business analysis is intertwined with AI tools to improve decision making and strategy. Initially, users will see the enhancement of existing features. For instance, analysis tools will incorporate the INVEST and MOSCOW analysis methods, facilitating clear, testable user stories for agile development.
Over the next few years, a new wave of upcoming AI technologies like AI agents will help BAs further delegate repetitive tasks to AI. The human-AI collaboration in business analysis is set to redefine the industry. And cutting-edge tools like Copilot4DevOps are the key to flourishing as a BA.