AI Deployment
Summit

Enterprise Strategies for AI Success

REGISTER

May 1,
2025

Virtual Summit

Mendix is adding multiple AI-driven enhancements to its popular low-code development platform. The goal is to help organizations effectively combine AI and low-code for digital transformation projects, according to Mendix execs.

“At Mendix, we see the combination of AI and software built with low-code as two sides of the same coin: AI-Assisted Development (or Smart Development) and AI-Augmented Applications (or Smart Apps), Gordon Van Huizen, Mendix senior vice president of strategy told IDN.  “We believe it’s a fusion. . . that is central to the future of software.”

The latest upgrade, Mendix 10.18, deeply integrates AI and low-code technologies to make software development and onboarding easier, as well as offer improved experiences for developers and better visibility and governance for GenAI apps, Van Huizen added.   

Notably, Mendix 10.18 sports four key capabilities to amplify the power of low-code and AI-assisted development for all aspects of the software development lifecycle.  

• Updates to the Mendix Artificial Intelligence Assistance (Maia): This  provide an easy-to-use set of generative AI-powered services to support smart development across the full SDLC -- from design through deployment.  Among these, Mendix’s adds Pipelines, a new deployment automation tool to ensure application quality and boosting developer productivity.
• Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs: These new resource packs make it easier to integrate AI capabilities by reducing entry barriers, providing preconfigured environments, and helping companies leverage their own data for more accurate outputs.
• Compass - AI-Assisted Guidance: For organizations new to low-code or digital transformation, there’s a real challenge in onboarding. Compass guides teams step-by-step through their transformation journey, helping to eliminate confusion and accelerate progress.
• Smart Governance for AI: Mendix’s new Content Filters help organizations ensure safe, responsible AI use by filtering harmful content and providing tools to manage compliance.Content Filters’ customizable filters provide tools to detect problematic content and promote content moderation.

Van Huizen helps IDN review these top Mendix 10.18 pillars in detail.

Updates to Maia - Mendix Artificial Intelligent Assistance

“Maia is designed to help development teams in modelling and delivering Mendix applications faster, more consistently, and with higher quality,” Van Huizen told IDN. “Mendix developers can use Maia to get guidance by asking questions, get recommendation and assistance for certain development tasks, and even generate part of their app.”

He also detailed how Maia includes it offers support at virtual every stage of AI app design, build and deployment, including:

• Maia Chat. A built-in chat interface that answers questions about app development in Mendix, including how to apply concepts, best practices, and development patterns. Recommenders:
• Best Practice Recommender. Helps users inspect their app against Mendix development best practice detecting and pinpointing development anti-patterns and, in some cases, automatically fixing them.
• Logic Recommender. Helps users model and configure business (microflows, nanoflows, and rules) through contextualized recommendations on the next best activity based on the activities and parameters that are already configured in applications.
• Workflow Recommender. Helps users model and configure workflows through contextualized recommendations on the next best activity in your workflow based on context-related information.
• Domain Model Generator. This AI-powered tool for generating a data model for  an application helps users generate entities and associations based on text input.

Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs – Cut Barriers To Entry

Mendix Cloud Gen AI Resource Packs are designed to give users a quick start way to access necessary AI components and reduce entry barriers, Van Huizen said.

Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs provide turn-key access to Generative AI technology, delivered through Mendix Cloud connections to AWS’s highly secure Amazon Bedrock multi-tenant architecture.   Mendix 18.10 features two types of GenAI resource packs.

• Mendix Cloud Model Resource Pack: This allows users to quickly create GenAI instances inside the platform, eliminating the need to set up their own hyperscaler environment. Users receive a monthly quota of tokens for Anthropic’s Claude and Cohere’s Embed models. Options to other models, including OpenAI, are available.
• Mendix Cloud Knowledge Base Resource Pack: Mendix Cloud Knowledge Base Resource Packs enable users to bring users’ own data for RAG, semantic similarity search, and easily connect to other third-party information sources. They support these popular GenAI patterns with an elastic, logically isolated vector database. 

Compass – AI-Assisted Guidance, Best Practices

For organizations new to low-code or AI-driven transformations, onboarding can be a challenge, Van Huizen noted. Mendix 10.18’s new Compass tool is designed to guide teams step-by-step through their transformation journey, helping to eliminate confusion and accelerate progress.

In specific, Compass aims to help ensure AI success by offering “intelligent AI-assisted development” tooling, according to Mendix. Compass guides organizations new to low-code through different aspects of digital processes -- and offers expert onboarding to the Mendix platform.

With the Compass tool, Van Huizen said, users can define their own vision of low-code and the apps they want to build. Once defined, users can simply follow a number of predefined best-practice milestones. Each milestone consists of action points which you can assign to members of your team for easy tracking. Users can also define additional tasks for each milestone, as needed, he added.

Mendix Advocates a Holistic AI Approach: People, Process and Solutions  

Beyond the technology, Mendix see a holistic approach will prove approach to tap into the biggest ROI from the convergence of low-code and AI.  Van Huizen explained it this way:  

At Mendix we see AI/low-code as a new means of developing software that affects every aspect of an enterprise including its people, processes, and solutions, in addition to the platforms and technologies that are used.

 

We emphasize a value-driven approach, under the theme of digital execution, where customers are encouraged to define clear goals for their applications, determine how these new solutions of AI and low code can best benefit their organization.

 

We aim to help organizations adopt AI and low-code technologies in an efficient and successful manner, while also ensuring their continuous improvement, ongoing alignment with the company’s strategic goals, and usage of KPIs to measure progress.

Getting Started: Start Small, Onboard Your People, Not Just Technology 

To get started with AI, Van Huizen advises companies should go slow and start small – at least at first. Firms should take the time to effectively onboard both the technology – as well as their staff so they nail down the best collaborations. 

Organizations can – and should – start small, incubating the approach through a small team that acts as the nucleus for what will become an organization-wide approach.

 

Rather than immediately onboard new technology without properly building and preparing the organization on how to approach it, it’s important to ensure that enterprises are putting forth the necessary prerequisites in place to determine how these new tools can best be utilized, who is equipped to use them, and the right way to manage their journey.

 

The people of an organization are absolutely critical to the success of an AI/low-code program. A diversity of skills and experience lend itself well to creating new types of software. And laying the right foundation is essential.

 

[You] start small in order to create the right structure, which will in turn become a scalable and repeatable process that can be widely adopted.

Van Huizen also shared several practical steps to successfully get started

• Place program owners or managers that empower collaboration across teams and departments.
• Determine software development practices that can be adopted across departments.
• Create a means for ensuring that all software created through this program align back to the digital transformation vision.

One Mendix customer shared his results. 

“Mendix provides us with the ability to quickly prototype a new feature or behavior,” said Luke Zawadzki, datascalehr’s Head of Engineering. datascalehr is a business services organization that delivered an AI-native payroll platform with Mendix. “This allows us to test drive living, breathing functionality early in the process and discover problems or make adjustments early. It’s great from a development perspective because you can actually deliver what your customers want.”

Mendix Updates Come as Enterprises Are AI-Eager, But Look for Help   

Mendix’s release of Mendix 10.18 comes as the company released a study that found companies eager to start AI projects but also have lingering concerns. 

For a majority of technical leaders, the need for further education for both developers and non-technical users will be key, the survey found in part:  

The report, The Low-Code Perspective: Insights from Enterprise IT Leaders, found a lion’s share of enterprises (85%) agree that combining AI and low-code would help their organizations innovate faster. 

That said, the report also found an equally impressive majority (71%) admitting to lingering concerns, especially regarding the need for better collaboration between and across IT and non-IT staff, as well as ways to implement governance around AI-assisted coding.

• 3 in 4 technical leaders are concerned about the governance of AI-assisted coding
• 4 in 5 agree that more training needs to take place to ensure developers are using AI-assisted coding properly
• 83% agree that the C-suite in their organisation understands that they will need to upskill their technical staff to capitalise on the potential of low-code
• 73% agree that the C-suite in their organisation understands that they will need to upskill non-technical staff to create fusion teams that capitalise on the potential of low-code

This survey report is based on responses from 2,000 senior decision makers gathered by Coleman Parkes and was released by Mendix.