Currently, the market demand for traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices is experiencing rapid growth, rendering quality control and safety assurance even more pressing issues. Conventional testing methods for traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices, which are heavily reliant on subjective experience, limited in detection precision, and unable to comprehensively quantify complex constituents, are increasingly inadequate in satisfying the requirements for accurate classification, differentiation, and precise measurement of components in these materials. The rapid development and widespread application of artificial intelligence (AI), however, offer novel solutions for the testing of the traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices. This study summarizes the existing methods and current status of testing for the traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices, sorts out the typical applications of AI in medicinal material classification, authenticity identification, traceability of origin, harmful ingredient measurement, effective ingredient measurement, and medicinal effect measurement, and analyzes the current problems regarding data collection and standardization; sharing of testing data; demands for rapid, non-destructive, low-cost testing technologies; accuracy of testing data; and fusion of multi-modal testing data. The study believes that intelligence, precision, and speed are the key development directions for the testing of the traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices. To this end, we propose the following suggestions: continuously improving the testing standards and data sharing system, deepening the research and application of AI, strengthening the application of multi-modal data fusion technology, introducing new sensor technologies, and enhancing the supervision over AI applications, so as to promote the high-quality development of testing for traditional Chinese herbal medicines and prepared slices, and ensure the continuous and healthy development of the traditional Chinese medicine industry.