This spring Claris CEO Ryan McCann published a piece on where the platform is heading. I read it twice. The first time as a developer. The second time as someone who has built systems for Swedish companies since 1989. Both times I reached the same conclusion: this is the most interesting time for FileMaker in a very long while.

This article is written for you who own or run a company with a FileMaker solution at the heart of the business. I go through what has actually happened in the product, what is coming later this year and what it means in money, hours and risk.

The technology is included where it is needed, always tied to what it does for your business. I spent the whole summer on further training in FileMaker and AI so that I could make this assessment properly.

Code is cheap now. Everything else remains.

Over the past eighteen months, AI tools have made it almost free to generate a working application from a text description. Prototypes that took weeks take minutes. It is a real change in the economics of custom software.

Generating an application is one problem. Running it inside a business is a completely different one.

The code has to be deployed. It has to be secured, given access controls, logged, backed up and maintained. It has to work on Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone and the web. It has to run on infrastructure you control, in the cloud or on your own hardware. And someone has to understand the data, the workflows, the users and the consequences when it fails at seven o'clock on a Monday morning.

McCann puts it better than I would have:

"When code is abundant, the people who understand context become the scarcest resource."

That is the whole point. Knowledge of how your particular business works becomes more valuable when writing code becomes cheap.

FileMaker solved this long ago

The rest of the industry is now building the infrastructure around AI-generated code. Database, login, permissions, traceability, backup, recovery, distribution to every platform.

McCann notes that this is exactly what FileMaker already is: a single coherent platform where data, logic, interface, security and distribution were built together from the start. Claris sums it up by saying they have been solving the problem at scale for more than forty years.

Forty years can sound like a liability in an industry where everything has to be new. I see it the other way round. Forty years means the teething troubles are gone, the files survive version changes and there is a working upgrade path for systems already in operation. Claris is also a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Inc. The ownership is long-term and the capital is there.

For you as a business owner it means one thing: the platform will still be here in ten years.

My own story begins in 1989

I first saw FileMaker in 1989, at the Sheraton in Stockholm. I fell in love on the spot.

That same year I built WSS – Watz Sales System – because I was working in telephone sales with no system support and grew tired of working blind. I sold considerably more than my experienced colleagues. That was ten years before anyone in Sweden started using the term CRM.

Since then it has grown to more than 200 systems. Four examples that show what it is about:

Three of my solutions have been in continuous production for 26 years. Still in daily operation, at companies that make money from them every day.

That is what I mean by long-term thinking. A system should last ten to twenty years, otherwise the architecture is wrong. Quick fixes only push the cost into the future and add interest.

What FileMaker 26 gives your business

FileMaker 26 was released in June 2026, with an update in August. Claris raised the version number to 26 to match the year. The focus is on reliability, productivity and infrastructure. Here is what that means in practice.

The business does not stand still when the server does. Two new features are called Standby Server and Remote Backup. Standby Server is a reserve server that is kept warm and can take over. Remote Backup automatically places the backups somewhere other than where the system runs. Ask yourself: if the server fails at nine o'clock on a Tuesday, how many hours does the business stand still and how much data do you lose? For most companies I talk to, the answer is uncomfortable. This solves it as a product feature instead of a custom build.

Fewer outages for other reasons. The services that handle the web side now restart automatically after a crash, instead of staying down until someone notices. The system is certified for the latest versions of macOS and Windows Server, which is the first question every IT department asks.

Documents that assemble themselves. Six new PDF commands make it possible to build a document from several parts automatically. A quote with cover page, specification, drawing appendices and terms can be produced and sent in one go. The same goes for inspection reports, contract packages and monthly reports. Work that today is often done by hand in four programs.

AI in the system, with more providers to choose from. FileMaker can now talk to Google Gemini alongside Anthropic, OpenAI and Cohere. In concrete terms: load your own documents as a knowledge base your staff can query, add descriptive text to images automatically, and let the system answer questions asked in plain language. Support for several providers means you can switch when price or quality changes.

Less friction in everyday work. Fields can be given understandable display names in exports and sorting without anyone touching the underlying structure, so that an Excel file for the accountant gets readable column headings. Shared tablets in the workshop can clear login traces between users. Configuration can be saved as part of the system instead of in loose records that happen to get deleted.

Beneath the surface, Claris has also made the structure of the system readable from outside in a way that was not practically possible before. It sounds technical. It is the prerequisite for the next section.

Now you can "talk" to your system

With the third-party tool ProofKit it is already possible today to chat with a FileMaker solution through Claude or an equivalent service. It works in two directions.

For you and your employees. Ask the system in plain language and get answers from your own database:

• Which customers have not placed an order in six months?
• What does the margin look like per project manager this year?
• Which work orders have been left unanswered for more than a week?

And in the other direction: update information by describing what should change. Without first learning where in the interface the data lives, and without anyone having to build a report in advance.

Later this year Claris will take the next step in FileMaker's AI journey

For development of the system. Changes to the solution itself. Scripts, fields, layouts, calculations. You describe the logic that is needed, and the agent writes it into the existing architecture. For you as the client it means shorter lead times and a lower cost per change.

Both depend on the same thing: the AI has to understand your solution. One of the new features in FileMaker 26 is precisely what makes that possible.

Your business knowledge needs to be written down

Here comes the part I think too few people talk about, and the only point in this entire article where I ask you to do something this autumn.

A field named t01_dat_mod tells an AI nothing. A field with a description explaining what it contains, when it is set and how it should be interpreted makes all the difference between a useful answer and a guessed one. The same applies to your terminology. That "active customer" in your company means someone who has ordered in the past eighteen months is nothing a model can guess.

FileMaker 26 introduced a dedicated place to write that description, intended specifically for AI and separate from the developer's own notes. The description is included automatically when someone asks a question in plain language. The equivalent has existed for tables for some time.

The quality of that documentation determines how well AI support will work for you next year. Documentation has always been a virtue. Now it becomes a competitive advantage.

Free choice of AI tools

Claris is making FileMaker a primary target inside the AI tools developers already use: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex. The developer chooses a tool and describes what is needed. The result lands directly in your solution and automatically inherits your existing security and permissions.

McCann says that work which used to occupy a team for weeks can now be finished in an afternoon. The consequence he draws is that projects once set aside as too expensive have become worth building again.

That is the point I would ask you to hold on to. Think of the list of things you have wanted to do in the system but put aside because the quote came in too high. That list is worth taking out again.

An important detail in how it is built: you are never tied to a single AI provider. As the tools get better, which they will do quickly, your way of working follows along.

The developer previews were promised for the summer and had not yet opened when this was written in early September. Be clear about that internally: the agentic functionality is not in today's version. What exists is the foundation it will stand on, and that foundation is worth preparing for now.

Claris has cleared away the IT departments' doubts

This is work that has been going on for a long time and rarely gets attention, even though it decides whether FileMaker is even allowed into the room with a larger customer or a procurement officer.

• SOC 2 Type 2 report for FileMaker Cloud, covering security, availability and confidentiality. The report is released to customers after a signed non-disclosure agreement.
• ISO/IEC 27001 for information security and ISO/IEC 27018 for personal data in the cloud, certified by BSI under Apple's certification process
• AES-256 encryption of stored data, enabled by default in the cloud and optional on your own server
• Automatic handling of SSL certificates
• Sign-in with two-factor authentication or through the company's own identity provider, for example Okta or Microsoft Entra ID
• Permissions all the way down to individual fields

Add a standby server and automatic off-site backups, and the continuity question is covered too.

The practical value for you: when a customer, an auditor or a procurement process asks how you protect data, the answer can be delivered as documents instead of arguments. I have seen that difference change the whole conversation with an IT department.

The competitor is still called Excel

Here is what makes FileMaker unusual. All of the above has been built without the platform losing sight of the small and medium-sized company.

You might think FileMaker's competitor is Salesforce, SAP or Microsoft Dynamics. In reality I meet Excel. A spreadsheet on a shared drive, with a formula only one person understands and a column someone happened to sort wrongly in March.

An ERP implementation often starts at six-figure sums before the first user is in the system. For a company with twelve employees that is not an option. But that company has exactly the same need for traceability, permissions and backup as a company with twelve thousand employees.

A small company can very well have a business-critical solution. The requirement is the same: flexible, stable, fast to develop and possible to change when the business changes. That is exactly the gap FileMaker fills, and it is why the platform is still here after forty years while much else has come and gone.

Old FileMaker systems can get a whole new life

Many companies I talk to have a system that works but that nobody really owns any more. The original developer has left, retired or changed industry. The system keeps running. Nobody dares touch it.

What is happening now changes the calculation in three ways:

1. Maintenance becomes cheaper. Mapping and documenting an existing system goes faster when the structure can be read by machine. A modernisation can start from facts instead of guesses, which also makes the quote more accurate.
2. Shelved projects become profitable again. Reports, overview screens, mobile solutions for the field and integrations with the accounting system are suddenly within reach of a budget that used to say no.
3. Reliability is solved in the product. A standby server and automatic off-site backups remove a risk many have quietly lived with for years.

A twenty-year-old FileMaker system is rarely junk. It is usually a well-functioning business model built into software, by someone who understood how you work. That model is worth preserving. The interface, the security and the infrastructure around it can be modernised, and then the system can live for another twenty years.

What I am doing about it

I spent the whole summer of 2026 on further training in FileMaker and AI: the new features, how to build a knowledge base from a company's own documents, the agentic tools and how to make an existing solution readable for an AI.

From 30 September to 2 October I am travelling to Malmö for engageU, the European Claris conference for business and technology. Three days where business leaders and developers meet. New this year is that the first day has a clear business profile aimed at decision-makers, with cases from companies that use FileMaker.

The purpose of both is the same: I want to be able to help more companies take their FileMaker solution into the future. If you are going too, get in touch and we will book a meeting.

Conclusion

The platform has forty years behind it. Thirty-seven years with my own clients. Three systems still in production since the last millennium.

Throughout that time the assignment has been the same: understand the business well enough to turn it into software that holds up in real conditions. The tools have been replaced many times. The assignment has stayed put.

An AI can write the code. It needs a human's help to know why the invoicing data has to be locked on the 25th, or what happens when a fitter loses coverage in the middle of an inspection. That knowledge sits with you and your colleagues, and it is worth more now than it was two years ago.

The difference today is that the tools have caught up with the level of ambition. That makes this the most enjoyable time to build FileMaker systems since I started in 1989.

Sources: Ryan McCann, "How Claris is building for what comes next", claris.com, May 2026. Claris FileMaker Pro Release Notes, versions 26.0.1 and 26.0.2. Claris Cloud Services Security. engageu.eu.