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arXiv · 2606.01772

Faster than the Team, Faster than the Customer: Tool Integration, Collaboration, and Organisational Lag in AI-assisted RE

Jan-Philipp Steghöfer
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Abstract

The impact of applying generative AI tools to requirements engineering (RE) in industrial practice remains poorly understood. This paper examines how AI-assisted RE tools are used in industrial practice at XITASO, a medium-sized enterprise for high-tech software engineering, and how they reshape workflows, tool integration, and PO--developer relationships. We combine a 2024 company-wide use-case survey with two rounds of semi-structured interviews with eight product owners (POs) in late 2025 and spring 2026, covering an in-house chatbot and seven commercial AI tools. We identify 15 distinct use cases across four categories: product backlog management, tender management, requirements and domain understanding, and document and artifact creation. Three findings emerge. First, the effect of AI on PO--developer interaction is mixed: the prevailing single-user interaction model can substitute for collaborative dialogue, and developers do not always welcome AI-generated artefacts. Second, tool integration -- not tool capability -- is the binding constraint: where integration is in place, time savings are dramatic; where it is missing, POs fall back on manual workarounds. Third, AI advances faster than the surrounding organisational systems, so its benefits accrue to individual POs while team processes and customer readiness remain the bottleneck. The empirical GenAI-RE literature remains dominated by early-stage, lab-oriented evaluations of isolated tasks while practice has moved into territory it has not yet studied: practitioners are already assembling cross-tool integrations, navigating customer governance, and renegotiating role boundaries. From these patterns we derive a set of questions practitioners considering AI-assisted RE may ask of their own situation.

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Jan-Philipp Steghöfer. 2026-06-01. Faster than the Team, Faster than the Customer: Tool Integration, Collaboration, and Organisational Lag in AI-assisted RE. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01772

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