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
| Feature | Traditional Automation | Agentic AI QA |
|---|---|---|
| Creation | Manual Scripting | Autonomous Discovery |
| Maintenance | Manual Refactoring | Self-Healing |
| Flexibility | Rigid / Fragile | Adaptive |
| Reliability | Susceptible to Flakiness | Logic-Driven Resilience |
| Expertise | SDET / Framework Knowledge | Domain 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.