Technical Tuesday: How AI agents are transforming software testing

AI is already embedded in every phase of the testing lifecycle, from test planning to test execution, across the entire testing lifecycle. The question facing enterprises today isn’t if AI is essential for software testing, but how fast you can make it work for your software testers and quality engineers.

One of the fastest and most effective ways to put AI into the hands of your software testing teams is agentic testing. Agentic testing is a new approach that leverages AI agents—AI-based software entities able to perceive their environments, process information, and take actions to achieve specific objectives.

In this blog post, I’ll explain why agentic testing is the next evolution of software testing: AI-powered, integrated, and purpose-built for modern, fast-paced software development. I’ll also show how UiPath delivers the gamut of both out-of-the-box AI agents and custom AI agents through UiPath Test Cloud.

What is agentic testing?

Agentic testing means augmenting software testers with AI agents across all phases of testing to not only accelerate and simplify their work but to unlock what they couldn’t do before. It's AI that works with you, not instead of you.

Testing agents don’t just execute scripts; they understand goals. They assist testers in quality-checking requirements, generating test cases, automating manual test cases, and providing real-time, actionable insights into test results. These agents act with autonomy and intelligence, responding to the broader, messier, and a lot less predictable challenges that are becoming increasingly common in modern quality assurance (QA) environments.

Agentic testing elevates software testers. It hands off repetitive but context-heavy tasks to AI agents so teams can focus on more strategic tasks in testing.

UiPath Test Cloud: built for testers, powered by AI agents

To accelerate agentic testing and bring powerful testing agents into the enterprise, we’ve created UiPath Test Cloud.: From performance testing to functional testing—Test Cloud brings it all together. It comes with open, flexible, and responsible AI across every phase of testing—from test design and test automation to test execution and test management—and all that across your software applications, platforms, and ecosystems—like SAP®, ServiceNow, or Salesforce.

Test Cloud delivers:

• Test design: harness AI to quality-check requirements and generate manual test cases with detailed step-by-step instructions. With context grounding (RAG), Test Cloud ensures AI-generated test cases are relevant and accurate.

• Test automation: automate test cases the way you want—whether it's low-code or coded UI or API automation, across any of your enterprise ecosystems.

• Test execution: leverage self-healing, distributed, and cloud-based test execution and plug your testing into your ecosystem with CI/CD integrations to keep pace with fast-paced agile software development teams.

• Test management: Test Cloud offers rich analytics, test data management, and over 50 integrations with application lifecycle management (ALM) tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, and SAP Solution Manager. These capabilities empower you to orchestrate testing across teams and platforms.

Test Cloud isn’t just built for software testing today; it gets enterprises ready for what’s coming next. On the one hand, it helps you automate the traditional, deterministic, and rule-based testing tasks teams have been doing for years. But Test Cloud also helps you automate and streamline the messier, non-linear and non-deterministic testing challenges that are becoming the new normal. That’s the power of agentic testing.

UiPath Autopilot: out-of-the-box agentic testing

UiPath Test Cloud brings agentic testing to life in two ways. The first—with its focus on fast, out-of-the-box agentic testing—is UiPath Autopilot™, which is fully embedded in Test Cloud.

Autopilot is like a digital testing companion, designed to support testers from start to finish. It acts as a ready-made testing agent able to handle a vast range of core testing tasks, from generating test cases to analyzing test results.

Here's how it transforms each phase of the testing lifecycle:

Test design

UiPath Autopilot intelligently analyzes requirements—whether they’re user stories, SAP transactions, or even documents like BPMN diagrams—and generates high-quality manual test cases, complete with step-by-step instructions and expected outcomes. You can fine-tune the results with optional prompts—for example, ‘focus on usability scenarios’ or ‘include invalid input cases’—for precision and coverage.

Test automation

Turn those manual test cases into working automated scripts. Autopilot reads the steps, taps into your object repository, and generates either coded or low-code automations. It can even fix validation errors, generate synthetic test data, and perform fuzzy verifications—streamlining a process that used to take hours into minutes.

Test management

Once test cases are running, Autopilot turns raw logs into insights. It analyzes execution results to surface common failure patterns (e.g., performance errors), links them back to their root causes, and recommends fixes—all through a dynamic, interactive reporting interface. Plus, you can search your entire test project the way you think, in plain English.

All of these out-of-the-box AI agents provided by Autopilot are made secure within the UiPath AI Trust Layer, ensuring open, flexible, and responsible AI that’s easy to track and respects your enterprise data policies.

You can see how UiPath Autopilot augments testers and accelerates the entire testing lifecycle in the demo below:

UiPath Agent Builder: Custom testing agents, built your way

These out-of-the-box AI agents provide a great starting point—but they're not nearly enough to cover the full range of challenges you're facing in software testing. For teams with unique testing challenges, UiPath provides UiPath Agent Builder, enabling you to create custom AI agents that are tailored to your specific testing needs.

Watch the Agent Builder Dev Dive.

Testing agent development from scratch

Agent Builder lets you choose the foundational large language model (LLM) your agent will run on, whether it’s from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or your own custom model. Testers can then build out the rest of their testing agent with natural language prompts and tool selection. They can define the agent’s goals, responsibilities, and behavior just by using plain English. Finally, testers can connect their agent to the necessary tools like prebuilt activities, existing UI or API automations, or even other agents.

Test, tune, and trust your testing agents Crucially, Agent Builder isn’t just a development environment for agents, it’s also a place where you can test them. Agent Builder provides built-in evaluation tools that let you test agents before deployment. Testers define scenarios, run test cases, and get an overall health score that helps them evaluate agent performance. They will even receive suggestions on how to improve their prompts or agent designs, ensuring agents are both effective and reliable.

Get the checklist: 10 steps for getting started with Agent Builder for agentic testing

Deploy and share via UiPath Autopilot

Once built, custom testing agents can be accessed through UiPath Autopilot in our Assistant, making them easily accessible to your entire testing team. Custom agents will appear in natural language conversations, suggested when their skill set matches a challenge a tester is facing. It’s like having an experienced coworker jump in at the right moment to keep the testing lifecycle rolling.

To see how easy it is to build custom agents in Agent Builder, watch this demo where we create a ‘data retriever’ agent helping testers find test data in their software applications:

Custom testing agents built with Agent Builder are powerful productivity force multipliers. However, custom agents are typically narrowly focused in their function and so have a bounded value. It’s the combined use of multiple custom agents, in conjunction with generalist testing assistants like Autopilot, which accelerates and simplifies testing.

Here’s a sneak peek at what’s coming next...discover how our built-in AI agents and your custom AI agents will soon team up to become your digital testing buddy:

I've also written about agentic testing on the UiPath Community blog. Read "Agentic testing: augmenting testers with AI agents for greater productivity."

The future of testing is agentic

Agentic testing isn’t a future state, it’s happening right now. By combining out-of-the-box AI agents via Autopilot with the flexibility to build your own agents with Agent Builder, UiPath Test Cloud delivers all the capabilities you need to start agentic testing today. We empower testers and engineers to work smarter, move faster, and focus on what truly matters: delivering high quality software at high speed, with confidence.

And all this isn't just a concept or an idea, agentic testing is real—it's delivering real value to real customers today. Take Cisco, for example—they've been able to cut their testing efforts almost in half with our agentic testing capabilities. And if it's making such a real difference for Cisco, just imagine what agentic testing with Test Cloud could do for you.

If you want to explore more:

• Watch our agentic testing webinar

• Try UiPath Test Cloud today