Note: This is a translation of the official press release in Japanese. In the event of any discrepancies, the Japanese version shall prevail. The original Japanese version is available here.
Tricentis Japan LLC, January 19, 2026 –Tricentis, the global leader in AI‑augmented software quality, has announced its 2026 trend predictions for the software quality market, presented by the company’s CEO, Kevin Thompson.
The rapid evolution of generative AI is driving application development and business processes to unprecedented speeds. At the same time, several challenges are becoming increasingly visible, including declining quality, a rise in post‑release incidents, and limited visibility into the ROI of AI investments. In response to these shifts, Tricentis predicts that two major trends will accelerate as companies move toward 2026, based on its work with global customers and analysis of broader market dynamics. These trends are the redesign of development processes with quality as the starting point and the transition from general‑purpose AI to specialized AI intelligence.
1. Staying ahead of AI evolution: Quality redesign becomes essential for mitigating business risk
The speed of AI‑driven change is surpassing any transformation the business world has experienced, and it is expected to accelerate even further. Over the past 18 months, application update cycles have shifted from quarterly to weekly, and in some cases even daily. At the same time, system integration issues are increasing, and AI‑generated code is entering environments faster than development teams can thoroughly validate it. As a result, overall quality is declining and the number of post‑release rollbacks continues to rise. Organizations are beginning to recognize that traditional software development and testing practices are no longer sufficient to keep pace with the speed required in the AI era.
Tricentis predicts that this mounting pressure will force companies to undertake significant transformation by 2026. In this environment, the long‑standing belief that achieving 90 to 95 percent test coverage is sufficient is reaching its limits. The remaining 5 to 10 percent, where volatility is highest and dependencies and risks are most concentrated, is precisely the area that is easiest to overlook and most likely to cause critical failures.
With nearly 80 percent of QA budgets still allocated to manual efforts, Tricentis expects organizations to shift toward autonomous, AI‑driven testing and risk‑based intelligence that can accurately identify areas of change and the parts of the system that require validation. The year 2026 will be a decisive turning point, when companies redesign the entire process from development to delivery around quality first, AI first, and automation first. This transformation will help organizations mitigate business risks and operate at the same speed as AI itself.
“2026 will be a watershed year in which a company’s competitiveness depends on whether quality can keep pace with the speed of AI. In the AI era, quality is no longer a testing activity but a core business decision.” said Kevin Thompson, CEO of Tricentis.
2. A turning point for AI investment: shifting from general‑purpose AI to specialized intelligence
Many companies have invested in AI, but only a limited number have been able to generate clear ROI in real business scenarios. A primary reason is the over‑reliance on general‑purpose AI and large language models. While general‑purpose AI has broad but shallow knowledge, it struggles to deeply understand industry‑specific context and the unique constraints of individual business processes. As a result, it has not been able to reliably solve high‑stakes, domain‑specific challenges that demand accuracy and trust. Tricentis predicts that this dynamic will shift significantly in 2026.
Companies will begin moving away from experimental uses of general‑purpose AI and shift toward adopting business applications built on specialized AI intelligence that is optimized for specific functional domains. These domain‑specialized applications combine AI processing power with expert knowledge and business context, enabling them to operate with greater reliability and practical value.
Organizations will realize true ROI not from general chatbots but from specialized AI systems that understand the complexity of their business processes and workflows. Companies that embrace this transition to specialized intelligence will be able to move beyond superficial AI adoption and enter a stage where AI directly drives business outcomes and revenue. And as noted earlier, the defining question for 2026 is not whether a company has implemented AI, but whether it has built a quality foundation strong enough to keep pace with the speed of AI.
About Tricentis
Tricentis is a global leader in agentic quality engineering. The Tricentis agentic quality engineering platform leverages the power of AI and decades of Tricentis technology and expertise to provide a new and fundamentally different way to ensure software quality across large and complex enterprise application environments. An approach that’s totally automated, fully codeless, and intelligently driven by AI. It addresses both agile development and complex enterprise apps, enabling enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by dramatically increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality. Widely credited for reinventing software testing for DevOps, cloud, and enterprise applications, Tricentis has been recognized as a leader by all major industry analysts, including Forrester, Gartner, and IDC. Tricentis has more than 3,000 customers, including some of the globe’s most respected brands such as Experian, T-Mobile, Jaguar Land Rover, Allianz, Telstra, Dolby, and VodafoneZiggo. To learn more, visit www.tricentis.com/ja.