Will Your AI-Built Apps Actually Work? Four Steps Every Enterprise Must Take

InnovationWill Your AI-Built Apps Actually Work? Four Steps Every Enterprise Must TakeByDan Faulkner,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 14, 2026, 07:30am EDTDan Faulker is the CEO of SmartBear, helping teams build, test, and ship quality software. getty​AI is creating software code faster than ever, and it is increasingly testing that code, too.​That’s not a good scenario for the overall quality of software development. If AI is talking to AI, and it gets any piece wrong, who’s to know? This is a classic black-box problem. And with reports of AI code-gen pretending to pass tests when it hasn’t, it’s an urgent issue for commercial software.​One of the key skills in testing is to know what to focus on. An AI code-gen that generates an infinite amount of tests is useless because the signal gets lost in the noise, and in practical terms, the test runs would never complete. ​So, if development teams are pushed to hit production goals and deploy a lot of AI-generated code that is increasingly tested by the same AI system that produced it, quality will suffer.​Testing Applications, Not Just Code​Testing code is only one part of ensuring application integrity, making sure an application actually works as it's intended. Equally important is the application-level testing that takes place after the code-level testing, and that is falling behind as AI code assistants put code creation into hyper speed. ​This gap exists because AI code-generation tools are not designed to perform commercial-grade application testing. Their strength is in producing and validating code, not in rigorously testing how entire applications behave under real-world conditions.​​Last Line Of Defense​​As AI accelerates both the volume and speed of development, pressure on quality will rise—and so will application failures unless testing k...