The Applause 2026 State of Digital Quality report, based on an August survey of members of the uTest community and other software development, QA and data science professionals, also found that 89% say AI has changed how they test applications, while 86% consider human involvement extremely important to functional testing. Despite the broad adoption of AI tooling, 57% emphasise that humans remain critical for delivering qualitative feedback through peer review, and the same share consider human expertise essential for designing test strategies grounded in real-world behaviour.
AI has reshaped day-to-day QA work substantially. The most common uses are creating test cases (65%), writing test automation scripts (62%), and identifying coverage gaps (48%). In development, 62% now use AI-powered in-editor assistants to generate or complete code, and 59% use AI for code review and documentation.
Tacita Morway, Chief Technology Officer at Applause, said: “AI has accelerated the development process, and that’s changing what teams need to test and how they need to test it. Traditional automated testing answers the question: can this task be completed? A human tester answers a harder one: could a real person work out how to do this, and get it done? Teams are giving up that second question as release cycles get faster than people can keep up with, and I think that accounts for a lot of the defect increase we’re seeing.”
The challenge is compounding for teams working with agentic systems. Morway noted that AI agents making decisions autonomously introduce failure modes that scripted tests cannot catch: the same request may take a different execution path each time, and consequential errors, inaccurate transactions, exposed data, dangerous guidance, happen when the agent makes a judgment call incorrectly.
Guidelines have not kept pace with practice. While 66% of organisations now have documented AI policies for development and testing, only 20% describe those guidelines as clear and robust.
The full report is available at applause.com.
To stay across the latest in cloud, AI and enterprise tech analysis from Compare the Cloud, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at https://www.comparethecloud.net/newsletter
