Your Next "Access Database Problem" Is an AI Agent | Simon GreenSkip to contentTheme

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If you have worked in IT for a while, you have probably at some point inherited an Access database, or certainly something that resembles one.

It was built years ago by someone in Finance, HR, or some other operations part of the business. It started as a quick shim to keep track of something the pre-existing systems did not handle well. Then over time it gained some new forms, some reports, a little bit of Visual Basic, and before anybody paid too much attention, it became critical to running the business.

Then the person who made it moved on.

Nobody really understood how it worked. There was not any documentation. It just worked. And this thing persisted through waves of hires and changes in the business, and people just knew how to use it because of institutional knowledge.

It lived on a shared drive somewhere with a filename that resembled Customer Database FINAL v6.accdb.

Every few months it corrupted itself, stopped accepting new records, or produced a report that did not quite match Finance. When that happened, somebody from the IT team would be summoned to fix an application they never built, never approved, and until that morning probably did not even know existed.

It is easy to look back and blame Microsoft Access, but I do not think Access itself is the problem.

Access was brilliant. It gave regular folks the ability to solve real business problems they were encountering without having to wait for some IT project to happen six months later. It allowed someone who understood the work, a domain expert in that area, to turn the understanding they held into a useful application for other people to benefit from.

The problem is not that people were building things with Access back then. The problem was that the cost of building that software suddenly fell, which on the surface of it sounds great, but the way organisations govern software stayed exactly the same. These small, business-area-scoped applications fell outside of the governance framework entirely.

Right now, we are doing it again.

Only this time, the things people can create go beyond storing some customer addresses and printing reports. They talk to APIs. They update larger production systems. They potentially communicate with customers, maybe even in real time. They handle approvals. They might move money. They form views on the fly from policy. And they are fundamentally making decisions on behalf of the business.

We have been through this cycle before

Access was one wave, but it was not the first and it obviously was not the last.

This will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered Excel macros, SharePoint workflows, or low-code platforms such as Power Apps. Each time one of these waves arrived, it compounded the ability of individuals across the business to create more and more complex outcomes with less and less friction.

Each wave lowered the barrier to creating software. Each created enormous value. Each also created a new category of mess for somebody else to clean up later.

So, again, the tools are not the things failing here. They are the enablers. They succeeded so well that organisations could barely keep up with the volume of things being created.

The debt became visible later. A department might save hundreds of hours using a clever spreadsheet, but five years later, when that spreadsheet has become mission-critical and the author has left the company, you have an exposed and crystallised risk.

Building a database in a week instead of waiting a year for a corporate system change is a totally rational decision, and not a problem to criticise.

So it is very easy to describe these things as failures of governance, but I actually think they are failures of scale.

The organisation has a process for governing ten large applications. It does not have a process for governing ten thousand small ones.

AI changes the economics again

So here we are once again, talking about AI and how it changes the economics.

It is not quite comparable to these prior examples. It is not a low-code platform. What it does do is change the cost of producing software by at least one, possibly more, orders of magnitude.

An individual no longer needs to understand database design, or Excel formulas, or VB scripting, or even the conventions of a low-code workflow in a tool like Power Apps. They can describe what they want in ordinary language and have a working version appear in front of them. They can speak in their own language to their own tame developer, who works without complaint and outputs exactly the product they requested.

It will not always be good. It will not always be safe. It might not be particularly well designed. But it will tick each of those categories just enough to solve the immediate problem in front of them.

It is very plausible when you think about it. You have an individual who notices that...