Two different things get called “AI for Access”, and most of the argument about whether it works is people comparing one to the other. One writes your VBA for you. The other builds the application so there is no VBA to write. They fail in completely different places, and which one you want depends on something you already know about your own database.
This is the one the Access community has been working through in public all year — Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT producing VBA and SQL, an MCP server wired into Visual Studio Code, agents running under a human who reviews what they did. It is real and people are getting value from it.
It also arrives with a condition attached, and the rooms discussing it have been honest about what that condition is: somebody still has to check everything it writes. Whole meetings have gone on code review, testing and how much to trust the output. That is not a complaint about AI being bad at code. It is a fact about what you own afterwards.
So the honest summary of the first kind is: it makes the writing faster, and it does not change who is responsible for the module at two in the morning. If your database earns its keep through logic that took years to get right, this is probably the road you want, and you should stay on Access or move to something else programmable.
The other kind never produces code, so there is no code to review. It changes the app directly, and it shows you the change before it makes it.
Ask for a delivery date on orders, shown on the list, and what comes back is a card: the
field it means to add, the type it chose, the view it will appear on. Apply, adjust, or cancel.
Nothing has moved until you press the button. Drop a .csv in and you get the same
card — every column, the type it inferred, and its reason for inferring it — before
a single row is written.
That is the same answer to the verification problem, arrived at from the other side. You are not reading generated code to decide whether to trust it. You are reading a plain description of what is about to change, in the words you used to ask for it, and it does not happen unless you say so.
A list of capabilities is worth more than an adjective, so here is all of it. It can add, change and remove fields; add and remove collections; add, change and remove views; change what search looks at; rename the app; and add records. That is the complete set. Ask for something outside it and it tells you it cannot, rather than improvising something that half works.
It is metered and it can be wrong. The public demo gives you three goes, because each one costs real money; an account has a monthly allowance rather than a per-session ceiling. When it misreads you, you say so and apply the next card, and anything it already did is in the Trash where you can put it back.
Open the thing you are trying to replace and ask what is really in it. If it is tables, forms, lists and reports — records people fill in and look at — then describing it in plain English is a genuinely faster road than having anything write you code, because the code was never the point. If it is a calculation engine with a form bolted on, no amount of AI on our side changes that, and I would rather tell you now.
If you would rather not do it yourself: tell us what the old system does and we will build a working version and show you. No fee and no card — what we build fits the free plan, and we ask you to pay only once it is genuinely running your business.
Northwind is Microsoft’s sample database. We are not affiliated with Microsoft, and Microsoft, Access and Northwind are their trademarks.