Jan 2026: QA in the Age of Generative AI & The Single Source of Truth Problem

Meetup – Thursday, 15th January 2026 | 7:00 PM
Venue: Waterford Treasures Museum (X91 K10E)

Join us for the first Waterford Tech meetup of 2026 at the Waterford Treasures Museum. The evening will feature engaging technical talks, networking, food and drinks, and spot prizes, with a focus on practical challenges shaping today’s technology landscape.

Speakers: Sophie Renshaw (Workhuman)

Sophie Renshaw is a Senior QA Engineer on the AI Engineering team at Workhuman, where she works on their AI Assistant. With a background spanning telecommunications, finance, and HR, she brings diverse industry experience to her QA practice. Sophie holds a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence, combining academic depth with hands-on expertise to deliver practical QA strategies for AI-driven products. Her current focus is testing agentic AI systems and large language models (LLMs).

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Tech Talk: QA in the Age of Generative AI

QA in the age of Generative AI is undergoing a massive transformation. As GenAI tools automate test creation and execution, the discipline is evolving from manual, test-case-based practices into an AI-augmented function. But when we're testing AI agents and LLMs themselves, systems that are non-deterministic and context-dependent, how do we maintain quality while keeping humans meaningfully in the loop?

In this talk, Sophie will explore how the QA role is evolving in response to GenAI, share practical approaches for testing agentic AI systems and LLMs, and make the case for why human judgment in QA is more critical than ever, even as AI handles more of the mechanical testing work.

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Speaker 2: Emlyn Farrell (Technology Consultant)

Emlyn Farrell is a technology consultant with extensive experience designing and delivering data platforms in complex, regulated environments. He has worked across pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and utilities sectors, helping organisations build reliable data systems that support operational and analytical decision-making.

In addition to his industry work, he is a part-time lecturer at SETU, contributing to technology and data-focused programmes. His professional interests focus on system design and data architecture, with a strong emphasis on applying data engineering principles to real-world operational environments.

Tech Talk: A Single Source of Truth "A Group Project gone wrong"

The idea of a “Single Source of Truth” sounds great until you actually try to build one across real systems, real teams, and real constraints. At that point, it often turns into a group project where everyone did the work and nobody agrees on the final answer.

In this talk, we’ll explore why the Single Source of Truth so frequently goes off the rails. Using examples from manufacturing environments and enterprise data platforms, we’ll look at how data silos form, how metrics drift over time, and how well-intentioned teams end up confidently presenting different versions of the same number.

The focus is on practical lessons from both industrial systems and software platforms. What works, what doesn’t, and what is usually learned the hard way, with an emphasis on trust, ownership, and decision-making rather than tools or vendors.

If you’ve ever watched a meeting derail because two dashboards didn’t agree, this will sound familiar.