How AI and Business Analysts Drive Project Value

Business analysts have long played a critical role in project success, and their impact grows even stronger when paired with AI. This article examines how business analysts and AI collaborate to enhance project delivery by improving requirements gathering, accelerating decision-making, and maintaining stakeholder alignment.

In brief:

• AI for business analysts enhances project delivery by improving requirements gathering, accelerating decision-making, and maintaining stakeholder alignment.
• With AI, business analysts can deliver faster insights, reduce risk, and improve outcomes, positioning teams to be more agile, informed and competitive.
• AI is not a replacement for top-tier BAs but a powerful extension for business intelligence. AI helps BAs reduce risk, improve clarity, and deliver better outcomes.
• AI tools support BAs by rapidly processing data, using predictive analytics, automating documentation, and filtering noise to surface important information.
• Early adoption of AI-powered business analysts gives you a competitive edge, with compounding effects over the next decade.

Around 70 percent of projects fail, but basic project management practices make projects 2.5 times more successful. Business analysts (BA) play a crucial role in project success, and now with artificial intelligence (AI), BAs are even stronger assets. Together, BAs and AI enhance project delivery by improving requirements gathering, accelerating decision-making, and maintaining stakeholder alignment.

My colleague and PMO expert Rick Morris encourages early adoption of AI-powered BAs.

“AI-augmented BAs deliver faster insights, reduce risk and improve outcomes,” Morris says. “Leaders who invest now position their teams to be more agile, more informed and more competitive.”

AI is not a replacement for top-tier business analysts — it’s a powerful extension for business intelligence. Together, AI and BAs reduce risk, improve clarity, and deliver better outcomes across every stage of the project life cycle.

The Benefits of Business Analysts in Modern Project Management

Business analysts are powerful assets in modern project management. The best of them are analytical, are great communicators and presenters, and increase the likelihood of successful project completion.

BAs bridge the gap between stakeholders and technology teams by using data to develop business insights and recommend changes. Business analysts proactively identify problems throughout your organization, including staff development, organizational structures or IT processes.

Business Analysts in Real-World Scenarios

Take a look at a few real-life examples of BAs in action:

• Software Development: Identify blocks in software development and recommend automated testing tools and standardized release documentation
• Employee Retention: Analyze high employee turnover with a root cause analysis to uncover drivers of employee dissatisfaction
• Project Management: Run proactive issue spotting to propose a practical solution to a project that is over budget or underresourced

What Makes a Top-Tier Business Analyst

However, not every BA is created equal.

With almost 1 million business analysts employed in the U.S., the BA job market is expected to grow by 9.7 percent by 2032. More people in the career field creates a distinction between mediocre, good, and great business analysts:

• Mediocre business analysts lack proactive problem-solving and don’t voice objections or raise issues.
• Good business analysts identify problems but don’t necessarily create action plans to fix them.
• Great business analysts identify a risk, alert the team, provide suggestions, and follow up to lower the risk.

Now that you understand the basics of business analyst work, let’s discuss how they work hand in hand with AI.

How AI and Business Analysts Work Together to Improve Project Outcomes

AI is revolutionizing the work of BAs. Top-tier business analysts are quickly embracing AI to save time, automate tasks, surface risks, and power data-driven decision-making.

While many companies are rushing to automate project management, completely replacing the human element is not easy. AI enhances business analyst capabilities, but it’s not a replacement for BAs.

“AI helps BAs work smarter, not disappear,” Morris says. “Similar to the project manager role, AI automates repetitive tasks like documentation and data analysis, freeing BAs to focus on more strategic thinking, stakeholder alignment and value delivery.”

Morris encourages organizations to focus on ways that AI enhances the work of top-tier BAs. Whether it’s predicting outcomes or extracting core information, AI can amplify the business analyst role. AI handles a lot of the heavy lifting while BAs bring their human judgment, communication skills and strategic expertise.

For example, AI can help:

• Clarify Requirements: AI can analyze past projects and stakeholder input to flag gaps early.
• Speed Up Decision-Making: Predictive models help BAs present options with data-backed outcomes.
• Decrease Information Overload: AI filters noise and surfaces what matters so BAs can act faster.
• Align Stakeholders: Sentiment analysis tools help BAs detect and address disconnects before they derail progress.

Let’s explore some of the AI tools that business analysts can use to work smarter.

How AI Supports Business Analysts

AI tools for business analysts typically focus on analyzing data, streamlining information, and recommending process improvements. Overall, AI allows BAs to focus on areas that require higher-level human judgment, such as empathy, intuition and expertise.

Here are a few ways AI supports BAs:

• Rapidly processing large, complex datasets to uncover patterns, trends and anomalies
• Using predictive analytics to model future outcomes, customer impacts, or financial projections
• Automating documentation to gather requirements, workflows, and updates without manual efforts

However, AI isn’t always perfect. Research from OpenAI shows that several reasoning models hallucinated 33–48 percent of the time. False AI insights can distract teams with outdated, incomplete, or biased datasets that lead to incorrect business decisions. Having human BA oversight eliminates the risk of incorrect judgment calls from AI and hallucinations.

Now that you’re ready to get started, take a look at our step-by-step walkthrough on integrating business analysts and AI.

Get Started With AI-Powered Business Analysts

Morris recommends starting small and using AI in practical ways. For example, use AI to summarize meetings, generate draft requirements or analyze stakeholder feedback.

To get started:

1. Train BAs on Prompt Engineering to Get Better Results

Accurate, thoughtful AI prompting is an underrated skill. Over 45 percent of survey respondents indicated that prompt engineering is the biggest driver of improving AI skills in the coming years.

Thoughtfully train BAs to guide, build and deploy AI by using their analytical mind to translate business needs into AI workflows.

2. Create a Framework for Responsible AI Governance

Outline guardrails and other data and security protections for AI usage. Ensure your AI governance model aligns with your company culture and incorporates checks for fairness and bias. These frameworks and rules will ensure that AI adoption does not compromise security while maximizing its benefits.

3. Encourage Experimentation and Cross-Functional Learning

AI isn’t meant to be in a silo. Encourage BAs to share their learnings across teams, and promote a culture of continuous optimization. Reward team members who experiment and proactively identify problems for AI to solve.

As AI adoption continues to accelerate, the future is clear: Project leaders and business analysts must work closely with emerging technologies.

The Future of Project Leaders and Business Analysts

Every company needs an AI-powered business analyst as modern business demands more from every employee. As program management expands, projects are becoming more visible, complex and fast. Companies are generating significant data, but many fail to use the vast majority of it.

Meanwhile, expectations across leadership and consumers are higher than ever, and businesses expect fast-moving, successful projects consistently throughout the year. The global AI project management market is projected to reach $14.5 billion by 2034 — that’s a drastic acceleration over the next several years.

The reality is traditional BA workflows and processes simply can’t keep up.

Especially as the pace of innovation accelerates, AI-powered business analysts will stay significantly ahead of the execution curve. They’ll become smarter decision-makers, faster communicators, and data-driven analysts who can build AI-powered ecosystems, with a significant portion of the manual labor being handled by AI.

Companies need to quickly embrace AI-powered human workers. For example, even though 80 percent of enterprise leaders believe that accessing data facilitates better decision-making, without AI, it’s almost impossible to speed up decision-making at scale. Around 78 percent of people say their company uses AI already in at least one business function, and that number has quickly risen over the last several years.

Early adopters of AI-powered business analysts will create a competitive edge for their businesses, with compounding effects over the next decade.

Elevate Your Project Management

The next era of project management is AI business analysts supported by thoughtful automation. Whether you’re just getting started with AI or beginning to launch your own AI agents, it’s time to up your game.

Forward-thinking companies are relying on third-party expertise to guide strategy, develop solutions, and help protect against shiny object syndrome.

“At Centric Consulting, we see AI as a force multiplier that sharpens a business analyst’s ability to ask better questions, spot patterns faster, and guide teams with confidence,” Morris says.

Combine our enterprise portfolio and program management team’s expert human insight with AI tools to enable more brilliant project execution. Talk with our team today. Contact us