The future of BA in the context of AI -- Reframing and Reshaping BA

Turning strategy into reality is the playing field of Business Analysis. As AI is reshaping the entire change delivery value chain, so should our profession. Our community has been actively exploring two critical questions: "How can AI improve Business Analysis?" (AI4BA) and "How can Business Analysis shape AI adoption?" (BA4AI). But beyond improvement through AI and shaping AI adoption, there's a third question—the elephant in the room: What will AI do *to* business analysis? Perhaps the mantra "AI will not replace you, but someone using AI will," while comforting, hides the real transformation before us. What if AI not only automates or augments the BA role in the change value chain? What if it fundamentally transforms the value chain and the role and responsibilities of BA in it? What if it entirely *removes* BA from the change value chain? How do we prepare for such a future? In this future, Business Analysis isn’t about requirements elicitation or prompt engineering. It's about *context curation*: selecting and specifying the context (intended outcome, scope, and guardrails) so that a generative AI system can iteratively build and deploy a successful implementation. And we'll have to reframe our role in three dimensions: across the entire change value chain, from operational change to strategic transformation, and across domains. Are you ready to reframe and reshape your role?