Requirements elicitation interviews are crucial for gathering system requirements but heavily depend on skilled analysts, making them resource-intensive, susceptible to human biases, and prone to miscommunication. Recent advancements in Large Language Models present new opportunities for automating parts of this process. This study introduces LLMREI, a chatbot designed to conduct requirements elicitation interviews with minimal human intervention, aiming to reduce common interviewer errors and improve the scalability of requirements engineering. We explored two main approaches, zero-shot prompting and least-to-most prompting, to optimize LLMREI for requirements elicitation and evaluated its performance in 33 simulated stakeholder interviews. A third approach, fine-tuning, was initially considered but abandoned due to poor performance in preliminary trials. Our study assesses the chatbot’s effectiveness in three key areas: minimizing common interview errors, extracting relevant requirements, and adapting its questioning based on interview context. Our findings indicate that LLMREI makes a similar number of errors compared to human interviewers, is capable of extracting a large portion of requirements, and demonstrates a notable ability to generate highly context-dependent questions. We envision the greatest benefit of LLMREI in automating interviews with a large number of stakeholders, enabling the efficient elicitation of the majority of requirements with minimal effort.