Kevin SuraceKevin Surace is an AI pioneer, inventor, author, and human effectiveness authority helping people thrive while AI reshapes work and life.

How AI Is Transforming Quality Assurance

18 Jun 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:44

In this segment, Kevin Surace highlights the massive scale of software testing and quality assurance (QA) spending—approximately $120 billion annually worldwide. He argues that artificial intelligence will soon dominate this effort, dramatically shrinking the need for large QA teams of hundreds of engineers. Surace uses JPMorgan as a case study, noting that a major bank manages roughly a thousand to fifteen‑thousand applications, most of which are legacy systems that require continual maintenance and testing. This ongoing upkeep drives QA costs to as much as 35 % of an organization’s IT budget, underscoring the economic incentive for AI‑driven automation in QA.

$120 billion a year is spent on end-to-end testing, QA. This is an area where AI is going to own that effort and there'll be some robot overlords, but you won't have, you know, teams of 400, 500 people doing this work. Lastly, something that people may not realize. And in fact, I'll ask you a question. Good-sized bank, JPMorgan. How many applications do they have that they manage in their network on a regular basis?
I'm going to say they're probably close to 1,000, if not more. 15,000. Way off.
Right. Nobody thinks that way. And 99% of them were written in the past. But you have to maintain them. You don't know what you broke, or you update some backend system which it connects to, like I said, dozens. And so this is an ongoing thing, and that's how the numbers get so high. Sometimes 35% of the IT budget is QA.