Is Manual Testing Dead? Why AI Is Exposing Our Blind Spots with Maaret Pyhäjärvi

[Dev]olution

We’re in a testing crisis nobody wants to talk about.

AI is catching bugs with a single screenshot while developers still say they “can’t test” and testers cling to specs that never reflect the real world. Meanwhile, teams ship code that breaks in production and call it normal.

Enter Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Director of Consulting at CGI. A polyglot programmer with nearly three decades in software quality, she’s been challenging testing dogma long before AI arrived. She hasn’t written a manual test case in 20 years. She believes testing is a team skill, not a job title. And she sees AI as the external imagination developers have always needed.

Maaret joins host Nicky Pike to break open the identity crisis hitting testing today. They talk through developers who claim they can’t test, testers who lost their ability to explore, and the uncomfortable truth that AI might already be doing parts of the job better.
If you’re ready to rethink how testing actually works in 2025, settle in.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. Why AI exposes gaps in human imagination
2. How manual test cases block learning and discovery
3. Why does testing become stronger when everyone owns it

Things to listen for:

(00:00) Meet Maaret Pyhäjärvi

(02:00) Testing not testers revolution

(04:30) When experts miss obvious bugs while testing

(06:50) Have we lost testing imagination?

(08:20) AI's profound impact on testing

(10:50) Why manual test cases are heresy

(13:00) The voodoo doll presence effect

(16:30) Permitting to explore freely

(18:30) Pairing developers with testing minds

(22:50) Testing for everyone, not just testers

(25:00) Serendipity and stubborn problem solving

(27:30) Quality engineers in the AI age

(29:20) AI as external imagination partner

(35:50) Contemporary exploratory testing workflow

(43:00) Teaching AI literacy and understanding

(48:30) Scaling AI testing at CGI

(52:30) Choosing tools versus building processes

(56:40) Programming literacy for data masses

(59:43) Testing's future in 2027

Resources:

Maaret Pyhäjärvi’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maaret/

CGI website: https://www.cgi.com/