Do you add Business Value to your PBIs with AI and telemetry?

Most backlogs have an Effort estimate on every PBI and an empty Business Value field. Product Owners are busy, and scoring hundreds of items by hand takes hours. When they do score them, the number often reflects who asked loudest rather than how many people the change helps.

Your product already records how people use it. An AI agent can read that telemetry for each PBI, count the people the change affects, and draft the Business Value with the evidence beside it. The Product Owner approves the number.

A value without evidence is a guess

❌ Figure: Bad example - A number with no reason, so nobody can tell whether it came from data or a hunch

The team cannot challenge a number like this, and it goes stale as usage changes.

Have the agent gather the evidence

For each PBI, the agent:

1. Works out which screen, route or event the PBI touches, from the issue and the code
2. Queries your analytics (such as PostHog or Application Insights) for 30 days of events and distinct users on it
3. Queries your error tracking or logs for failures in the same area
4. Drafts a Business Value with a one-line reason and a confidence level

Teams record value in different ways. Some use a number on the doubling scale, and some use a priority level such as Urgent, High, Medium or Low. Have the agent draft whichever your board uses.

✅ Figure: Good example - This board uses priority levels, so the agent counted the editors who use the create-document screen and drafted Medium, with the usage beside it

Mark the items the data cannot answer

Some PBIs leave no trace in telemetry. A silent failure logs nothing, a new feature has no users yet, and a request from one large customer looks small in the numbers. Have the agent say so and mark its confidence low, instead of stretching an unrelated number to fit.

Flag these as a Product Owner call. They are where the Product Owner's judgement matters most.

The Product Owner approves every value

The agent writes drafts to a file and leaves the board alone. The Product Owner accepts each value, picks a different one, or skips the PBI, and only approved values reach the board.

Telemetry counts how many people a change reaches. The Product Owner knows about the contract that renews next month and the feature marketing announced last week, so they make the final call.