2025: AI in QA Predictions
Every QA professional will need to demonstrate how they’re leveraging AI in 2025. The technology is accelerating rapidly, matching or exceeding human capabilities in many testing tasks as we exit 2024. The next year will bring more transformation to quality assurance than we’ve seen in the past decade. Here are the key changes AI will bring to QA in 2025:
AI-First
AI is at least 10X faster, and 100X less expensive than human labor — if AI might do it soon, you should be doing something different.
Slowdown in Hiring
In anticipation of the value of AI — people budgets will be cut and start converting to AI budgets — secure your role by adopting and using that AI.
AI Hybrid Testers
The most successful testers will be those that dive deeper into what makes them more valuable than the AI— and leverage AI to make them even better.
Testing AI
Competent testing of AI will become the most important area of core AI research — and all those researchers will have to relearn what testers already know.
AI Code Quality
The key benchmark for AI Code generation will transition from functionality and speed — to quality in real world conditions. Speed is great for a demo, quality is needed for production and the business.
Exemplar: https://www.qodo.ai/
Autonomous Testing
Only autonomous, AI-First testing agents can keep up with AI code generation — most test coverage be generated and executed by AI by year’s end.
Ad: AI Testing Agents for AI-First Developers: https://testers.ai
Reimagined QA
QA will not just have to re-think of how they do their jobs with AI, but also re-justify to the world why it is relevant. This will be uncomfortable and messy.
Ad: The easiest, smartest and quickest way to add AI to your testing: https://checkie.ai
Agentic False-Start
Agents will be the hot demos of 2025, but testers will realize they are too difficult to control, and even 90% reliability doesn’t make for useful test infrastructure.
Quick Wave of Promotions
AI adopters will promoted, even before ROI, at the expense of others.
Tool Fatigue
Testers will put their trust in the AI platforms and frontier models in 2025 — because QA Tools lost trust with marketing and demos in 2024.
Testing Services Fatigue
With budget pressure, QA management will sacrifice vendor budgets in favor of their close friends and management role.
Compliance and Safety
New roles will emerge just to ensure the creation and application of AI complies with new legal regulations.
Security
Security testing will rapidly transition to AI-First. Only machines will be fast enough, creative enough, and able to think at the scale required for security testing. The bad guys will force this transition quickly.
PM and Dev Will Test
AI, especially autonomous testing, means developers and product managers could do much of the testing themselves — testers would be wise to embrace AI before the rest of their team does
Conclusion
I understand the skepticism. Change can be uncomfortable, especially when it challenges established practices. But my predictions aren’t born from optimism or self-interest — they’re based on clear technological trends and shifts I’m already seeing across the industry. This transformation isn’t optional — and the time to prepare was yesterday.
Some may view these predictions as overly optimistic or self-serving. Those who’ve worked with me know my only goal is to help our community succeed. If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ll consider the changes ahead and start preparing now.
— Jason Arbon
founder, https://testers.ai
