Let me give you a number that should scare every QA engineer reading this.

According to the Sembi Software Quality Pulse Report 2026, 53% of all code is now AI-generated or AI-assisted.

That’s more than half. And it’s growing. The same report found that 61% of QA teams are reporting moderate to dramatic increases in testing demand because of all this AI-generated code. But here’s the kicker  only 17% of teams say AI-driven testing tools are actually making a significant positive impact.

Think about what that means. Developers are using AI to ship features 55% faster.
But for every hour AI saves a developer, it creates three more hours of risk for the manual QA team. And the quality? AI-generated code contains approximately 1.7 times more issues overall than human-written code.

Here’s a real story. A company I know automated everything. They had all the fancy tools. All their automated tests passed with green checkmarks. They pushed to production with full confidence. Day 1? The app crashed on older phones.
They lost ₹20-30 lakh in business and another ₹5-10 lakh in fixes. All of this could have been avoided by hiring one good manual tester for ₹8-12 lakh per year.