Towards Stakeholder-Grounded Requirements Engineering in AI System Specification

Abstract

AI systems often fail when their designs do not fit the needs, values, capacities, or constraints of the people they are meant to serve. Prior work has identified many reasons why this alignment can break down, including limited stakeholder authority, organizational incentives, deployment constraints, and power imbalances. Much of this work emphasizes eliciting the right stakeholder needs from the right people. We examine what happens after elicitation, when developers must translate stakeholder needs into concrete requirements and downstream AI design choices. We conducted a controlled human-subjects study (n=49) using Requirements Engineering (RE) artifacts to study this stakeholder-to-design translation process. Participants worked from stakeholder scenarios to produce requirements artifacts, then selected AI system components to "build" systems they believed would best fit each context. We evaluated these design choices against expert judgments of best-fit, aligned AI designs for each scenario. We find that conventionally well-formed requirements were not significantly associated with AI design choices that more closely matched expert judgments. Neither self-reported AI knowledge nor prior AI development experience significantly predicted design performance. In contrast, participants whose requirements identified plausible stakeholders, articulated contextually grounded goals, foregrounded human needs or constraints, and acknowledged relevant values were more likely to produce expert-aligned AI designs. We identify these dimensions as stakeholder-grounded reasoning. Our findings suggest that preserving stakeholder context through early design depends not only on eliciting stakeholder needs, but also on how developers translate those needs into written design guidance. AI development workflows should more explicitly teach, support, and evaluate this translation step so that stakeholder context is preserved as teams move from stakeholder needs to technical design.