Senior Business Analyst – AI Innovation

About Our Team

Digital Business Solutions (DBS) delivers innovation and solves customer and business problems by leveraging the power of technology, data, and — increasingly — AI. Within DBS, the AI Innovation team focuses specifically on identifying and delivering agentic and generative AI capabilities across our Salesforce ecosystem and adjacent platforms. We partner with customers, authors, editors, and Elsevier colleagues to drive intelligent automation, frictionless personalised experiences, and streamlined processes that support cost optimisation and growth. We provide the expertise to understand business challenges and translate them into practical, responsible AI-enabled solutions.

About the Role

The Senior Business Analyst will work with business units and technology teams to identify, scope, and deliver AI innovation opportunities across our Salesforce platform landscape — including Salesforce Agentforce, Data Cloud (Data 360), and Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based integrations, as well as adjacent AI tooling. The role focuses on hunting for value opportunities for sales teams; understanding the data and process foundations required to ground AI agents; and defining requirements and functional specifications that bridge business needs with emerging AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Partner with business and product teams to identify opportunities where AI agents, automation, and data unification can remove friction, reduce cost, or improve customer/employee experience

• Document current-state business processes and design future-state processes that incorporate Salesforce Agentforce agents, Data Cloud (Data 360), and MCP-based integrations

• Gather business requirements, high-level user stories, and acceptance criteria for AI agent workflows — including agent actions, guardrails, escalation paths, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints

• Assess data readiness for AI use cases (data quality, identity resolution, harmonisation) in partnership with data engineering teams supporting Data 360

• Plan and facilitate workshops to scope AI/agentic use cases, evaluate feasibility, and align stakeholders on priority and sequencing

• Work with technology teams (Salesforce, data engineering, AI/ML engineers) to produce detailed user stories and acceptance criteria that support development and QA, including for Agentforce agent builds and MCP server/tool integrations

• Maintain stakeholder expectations, communicate trade-offs of AI-driven solutions (accuracy, latency, cost, risk), and raise issues to project/product managers as needed

• Develop "trusted advisor" relationships with senior stakeholders through effective communication about AI capabilities, limitations, and responsible use

• Perform analysis on existing systems and processes to identify where AI/agentic solutions are technically and commercially viable versus where traditional automation is a better fit

• Track the evolving Agentforce, Data Cloud, and MCP/agentic-AI landscape, and translate relevant developments into concrete opportunities for the business

• Support change management and user adoption for AI-driven process changes, including documentation and enablement materials

Requirements

• Proven experience in process modelling (BPMN standard), eliciting business requirements, and translating them into clear user stories and acceptance criteria

• Hands-on experience with the Salesforce platform (Sales Cloud / Service Cloud); working knowledge of, or strong interest in, Salesforce Agentforce and Data Cloud (Data 360)

• Working familiarity with core AI/agentic concepts — prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool/function calling, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) — sufficient to translate business needs into technical requirements

• Understanding of data architecture fundamentals (data unification, identity resolution, data quality) as they relate to grounding AI agents on trustworthy data

• Solid understanding of software development methodologies, platforms, and tools, including how AI/agentic components fit into standard SDLC

• Demonstrated ability to plan and facilitate small to medium-sized workshops, including cross-functional AI use-case discovery sessions

• Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to translate complex AI/technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and vice versa

• Hands-on experience working in agile environments using recognised delivery frameworks such as Agile, Scrum, and Kanban

• Experience performing the Business Analyst role across the full software development lifecycle

• Experience with Lead-to-Cash processes and Salesforce

• Exposure to data analytics and data-driven decision-making, and familiarity with tools such as Jira, Confluence, Slack, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Teams

• A genuine curiosity about AI and a habit of continuous learning — this space moves fast, and the role requires staying current

Nice to Have

• Exposure to Salesforce Einstein, Copilot Studio, or comparable generative AI platform features

• Basic SQL or Python skills for exploring data sets and validating AI/data outputs

• Awareness of responsible AI principles (bias, privacy, explainability, human oversight)

• Salesforce certifications (e.g., AI Associate, Agentforce Specialist) or equivalent demonstrated learning

Work in a Way That Works for You

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. We offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance, and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and your long-term goals.

Working Pattern

Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive.

About the Business

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world's grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.

We know your well-being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. We are delighted to offer country specific benefits. Click here to access benefits specific to your location.

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