Angela Wick just gave us a reality check on the BA role that every analyst needs to hear. 💣
Here’s the takeaway with a little help from otter and claude.
🍩The Team of AI Agents Reality
This isn’t fiction – it’s happening NOW: Agents monitoring solutions for data blips. Agents providing strategic options, modeling scenarios, doing impact analysis, updating documentation. Agents assisting with spec-driven development and creating coding assets. Agents proposing roadmaps and analyzing requests.
In this world, BAs become the curator, facilitator, orchestrator, and critical thinker. We focus on decision velocity while agents do the heavy lifting work we supervise.
This elevates our role massively.
But Here’s The Catch
Angela went to multiple Dreamforce sessions where speakers talked about Agentforce’s “magic.” And every single time, someone casually said: “Well, of course, you have your process perfectly documented, and that’s what the agent references.”
Every BA in the room was thinking: “Have we EVER seen a process perfectly documented that an agent can reference?” 🤔
Here’s the battle: Big tech and big consulting firms are telling C-level leaders that with agents, we don’t need to write requirements anymore. It’s all automatic.
But reality? Our organizations are far too complex. Thousands of integrations. Interconnected processes. An agent can’t reference “perfect context” when that context doesn’t exist.
Maybe Salesforce has all their processes beautifully documented. But do YOUR clients follow those processes perfectly with no customizations? No integrations? No complexity?
Right. That’s what I thought. 😏
Angela’s take: We’re years away from this happening the way they’re saying it should.
Business analysis is still needed. Hugely.
We’re not being replaced. We’re being elevated – but only if we understand our new role as orchestrators, critical thinkers, and the humans who connect all these AI pieces together.
Angela Wick talking about Redefining the #BadAssBA in the Age of AI. With my co-hostess with the moistest Vanessa Grant running our monthly
#BadAssBA meetup
