Will AI Replace QA Teams? The Human Case for Testers in the Age of Agents — feat. Bill Kirst (Adobe)

Show notes

AI can write your test cases and watch your screen — but Adobe's AI ambassador argues it will never replace the human who asks the question no one else thought to ask. Alex and Kuba sit down with Bill Kirst — AI ambassador and change manager at Adobe, two-time author, podcast host and U.S. Army veteran — to unpack what generative AI actually does to QA and testing teams. Bill argues that the change-management playbooks that worked for 30 or 40 years of ERP rollouts break down when every user has an individualized, probabilistic experience with AI, so the real work is rebuilding trust that must be earned, kept and re-earned. The conversation gets concrete about testing: how LLMs took over converting requirements into test cases (once 30% of a QA team's week), how screen-recording tools now auto-generate test scripts from real user behaviour, and how agentic tools like Claude can regenerate training materials after a UI change and hand a team back four-to-six weeks of work. But because LLMs are probabilistic pattern-seekers — "it can write code but it can't engineer" — humans stay at the centre for edge cases, nuance, red-teaming and the "margins" between test steps. Bill reframes th