A BA meeting assistant that asks, not just records

The job, split in two

Business analysts already know the split. Capture is listening. Elicitation is the follow-up that turns a wish into a requirement. Most meeting tools only do the first.

• Capture: a faithful record of what was said, attributed to a person, with the decisions separated from the chatter.
• Elicitation: a question when the requirement has no owner, no acceptance check, or no priority. One question, then wait.
• Delivery: a BRD, user stories, and a RAID log written from what was confirmed, not from what the model thinks the project probably needs.

If the assistant cannot ask, you still leave with a transcript and do the BA work yourself that evening. That is a note-taker. It is useful. It is a different product.

What to demand of the assistant

Judge it on a real workshop, not a demo that summarizes a tidy recording. In the room, look for these behaviors.

• It asks when a statement is too vague to test. "Managers need visibility" should draw a question, not a bullet.
• It names the speaker. A requirement with no person attached cannot be confirmed later.
• It does not invent requirements the room did not discuss. A draft can propose a gap. It has to mark the proposal as unconfirmed.
• It can stay quiet. Some meetings should not have a voice in them. A scribe mode that only writes is part of the product, not a failure.
• The output is a document a builder can review: stories with acceptance, a RAID log with owners. A paragraph of themes is not that document.

How this differs from an AI note-taker

Note-takers such as Otter and Fireflies are built to transcribe and summarize after the call. That is the right tool when the meeting is a status update and you want a recap in your inbox. It is the wrong tool when the meeting exists to produce requirements, because the clarifying question has to happen while the stakeholder is still there.

A BA meeting assistant joins as a named participant, speaks only when something is unowned or untestable, and writes the BRD from the answers. The comparison pages lay out where a note-taker is still the better buy, including price and the platforms Ava does not support.

Using Ava in that seat

On a Teams or Zoom call, pick the Business Analyst persona when you want follow-up questions and a BRD, stories, and RAID log at the end. Pick the Requirements Lead when you want her to run a structured agenda and propose candidate requirements for the room to accept or rewrite. Both personas are on Pro.

She will not replace the BA who owns the relationship and the judgment about what to build. She does the repetitive part: asking for the missing field, and writing down only what the room confirmed.