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February 7, 2024

Agentic AI vs. Traditional Automation: A Technical Paradigm Shift

The transition from script-based automation to agentic AI represents a paradigm shift in software testing. This comparison highlights the structural differences between these two approaches.

High-Level Comparison Table

FeatureTraditional AutomationAgentic AI QA
CreationManual ScriptingAutonomous Discovery
MaintenanceManual RefactoringSelf-Healing
FlexibilityRigid / FragileAdaptive
ReliabilitySusceptible to FlakinessLogic-Driven Resilience
ExpertiseSDET / Framework KnowledgeDomain Context

Maintenance Effort

In traditional frameworks like Selenium or Playwright, maintenance often consumes up to 30% of an engineering team's bandwidth. Agentic AI systems autonomously resolve UI element shifts and API schema updates, significantly lowering this overhead.

Execution Reliability

By using agentic logic rather than brittle selectors, autonomous agents can verify application behavior through vision and state analysis, reducing the false positives common in traditional environments.