The A4Q Global Testing Summit 2026, organised by the Alliance 4 Qualification (A4Q), will be held online on 27-28 May. The conference will bring together software testing professionals from around the world to explore the latest industry trends, discover innovative techniques and learn best practices from leading experts in the QA and software testing field.
The Dichotomy of AI Testing
Iosif Itkin
Co-CEO & Co-founder, Exactpro
“AI is software that is reshaping our world. We are already surrounded by this technology, and it substantially affects our lives. Its influence on humanity continues to intensify. The ability to build, change and operate complex platforms is a key competitive advantage. To make sense of this new reality, we must understand how two forces – discovery and creation – evolve together: inquiry drives better design, and design opens new spaces for inquiry. In this talk, we will explore the antiparallel structures at the confluence of deep software testing and modern software engineering in the era of artificial intelligence – where understanding and building are inseparable, and progress in one domain impacts the other.
Ironically, the leading practitioners on both sides of this process often see each other’s reasoning as belonging to incompatible paradigms. They reject one another’s definitions and priorities, build strawman versions of opposing views, and fail to acknowledge any merit in the other side’s arguments
Both an individual industry professional and co-CEO of an independent software testing business, I have spent a substantial part of my career delivering mission-critical capital markets platforms – including electronic exchanges, clearing and settlement systems, algorithmic trading solutions, and fraud and market manipulation detection engines. Through this work, I learned to value both thorough thinking and fast delivery.
I believe that a careful exploration of this dichotomy can offer meaningful insights to leaders responsible for deploying transformational technologies, to advocates of modern software engineering practices, to software testers who take their craft seriously and to anyone interested in understanding these domains more deeply – as their relevance to society will continue to grow at a rapid pace.”
About Exactpro
Exactpro is an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing services for financial sector organisations. Our clients are exchanges, post-trade platform operators, and banks across 20 countries. Our area of expertise comprises protocol-based testing of matching engines, market data, market surveillance, clearing and settlement systems, payments APIs. We help our clients to decrease time to market, maintain regulatory compliance, improve scalability, latency and operational resiliency. Exactpro is involved in a variety of transformation programmes related to large-scale cloud and DLT implementations at systemically important organisations.
Our approaches leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help harness the power of exploratory data analysis and big data analytics to assist in the generation of test ideas and the interpretation of test results, supported by advanced execution capabilities of the th2 frameworks suite.
Founded in 2009, the Exactpro Group is headquartered in the UK and operates delivery centres in Georgia, Sri Lanka, Armenia, and the UK and representative offices in the US, Canada and Italy, and as well as a global distributed network of consultants.
Are you interested in gaining a deeper understanding of your system, reducing costs, accelerating time to market, while maintaining operational resiliency and regulatory compliance? Visit us at exactpro.com.
Iosif is Co-founder and co-CEO of Exactpro – an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing and related development services for financial organisations. Founded in 2009, Exactpro has a client base of major exchanges, post-trade platform operators, banks and technology vendors across 25 countries.
In his professional career, Iosif has held many technology roles: software developer, performance testing department lead, technology architect – on a number of global financial industry initiatives. Iosif’s expertise at the intersection of high-availability systems and capital markets has enabled him to successfully facilitate technology transformations within exchanges, investment banks and clearing and settlement organisations in London, New York, Milan, Singapore, Sydney and other major financial centres.
Iosif is a co-author of ‘Introduction to AI Testing: Guide to ISTQB® CT-AI Certification’ released in September 2025 by BCS Publishing.
Iosif has organised several industry conferences, including EXTENT – Software Testing and Trading Technology Trends Conference. He frequently speaks at worldwide FinTech events organised by industry associations such as the FIX Trading Community, Futures Industry Association, the World Federation of Exchanges, the Zero Outage Industry Standard and others.