There will always be a need for manual testing. Certain types of interactions within an application are always too unique, too complex and too costly to develop automated test economically. You will especially need more manual testers because there is a huge wave of upcoming enterprise applications that are being developed for mobile devices and tablets.
Why is this? Well historically the enterprise has always lagged behind the consumer market in adopting and using devices, but no longer. The enterprise are now enabling their employees and their customers to use mobile devices and tablets to access applications that were typically only available on desktop browsers. QA now has to deal with this and the fact that mobile platforms have a fast release cycle and apps are released even faster. So more devices running more OS versions running more apps. Recipe for QA disaster. Even web applications that were designed for specific desktop browsers configurations (usually IE running on windows) now have to be tested on an array browsers and operating systems.
So if you kept the overall percent allocation of resources the same, the actual resources needed to handle the manual tests will still increase. But keeping the status quo is not an effective strategy in this scenario. You need to leverage technology and develop a strategy to deal with this growth. Specifically you need to evaluate the return on investment on developing automated tests for your apps and applications. Under a scenario with limited target platforms, some tests are more economical to just manually test, however under this new paradigm these same tests can now be economically automated. New situation means new decisions.
First automated tests are extremely effective in testing permutations of devices, OS, and browsers. A manual tester would have to cycle through all the combinations one click at a time to test the app or application. But an automated test which is expensive to develop initially, could usually be run against each combination with only minor alterations to meet the discrepancies that arise. Even apps that were developed for specific platforms like iOS or Android would be effectively tested with this approach.
Most importantly the return on investment would continue to accrue going forward. Manual test costs occur at every release, while automated test costs occur during their development, which mainly occurs upfront when they are initially developed. If you have the belief that your application or app has staying power for near future, then it is worth the investment to develop a long term strategy to leverage automated testing vs. staying with the status quo.
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