The last decade has seen a massive shift toward automated testing practices, which wiped out the manual handling of a lot of rote tasks. But the pervasiveness of this change has been so quick that many industry players haven’t been able to contextualize it properly.

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear someone say automation will eliminate manual testing jobs — or that unit testing, integration testing and user acceptance testing are becoming inconsequential in today’s digital environments.

This is not necessarily true.

As founder and CEO of an independent software company, with over 20 years of experience in software testing, I want to burst people’s bubble about the future of testing with a few facts.

In the future, we can expect that robotic process automation, machine learning and AI will increasingly complement manual expertise. Automation, however, will never act as a total proxy for manual practices because no robot is a substitute for human inspection. Here are nine reasons.