Peter Verrykt, Business Unit Lead Data, AI & Automation at Xylos, sat down with two Senior Product Managers from our partner Mendix to talk about what AI in low-code means for enterprise IT. He shares three insights every IT leader should have on their radar today.

I recently had a fascinating conversation with Andrej Koelewijn (Senior Product Manager at Mendix) and Maurits Elzinga (Senior Product Manager at Mendix, focused on GenAI, Developer Experience and Extensibility) about how Mendix is embracing AI and what that means for organizations building the future today. As Business Unit Lead Data, AI & Automation at Xylos, this is exactly the kind of conversation that energizes me: honest, technically grounded and free of marketing haze.

Three insights that stuck with me.

The biggest misconception I still hear too often from enterprise IT leaders is that AI and low-code are somehow competitors. Maurits summed it up perfectly: "It's not low-code or AI, it's low-code and AI." And he has a point. Precisely because low-code operates at a higher level of abstraction, it only becomes more relevant in an AI-driven world.

Tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code generate thousands of lines of code at lightning speed, but someone still has to understand, validate and manage that code. A visual low-code model is a lot more accessible for that than an avalanche of technical boilerplate. Low-code and AI reinforce each other. AI in low-code is therefore not a contradiction, but the layer that makes AI manageable for the average organization.

Many organizations manage to get AI pilots off the ground. Building an agent, running a proof of concept, generating enthusiasm in the boardroom: today, that comes relatively easily. The real challenge lies in the last mile, the journey from pilot to production.

Andrej pointed to a familiar problem. Companies suddenly get blindsided by their cloud bill, because agents burn through tokens uncontrolled while nobody quite knows which agent does what, or why. That's why Mendix is actively working on monitoring dashboards, traceability and auditability for AI agents, so your organization keeps a grip on what's actually running in production. Maybe not the sexiest topic, but a fundamental one. Because without that control, scaling stops being growth, it becomes a risk.

Fragmented data, silos, uncertainty about which dataset holds the golden truth: these are challenges older than AI itself. What is new is the tooling to make it more manageable, and the urgency to finally tackle it properly.

Mendix integrates ontology and graph technology (via RapidMiner) to semantically connect data from different sources. That way, an AI agent doesn't just find data, it also understands how that data relates to other data. I've personally watched this kind of technology grow for more than ten years, in an evolution that runs from academic research to industrial application. We're truly ready for it now.

The shift from "subscribe to innovation" to "subscribe to innovation, security and governance" as a value proposition. That's not a marketing slogan, it's an answer to what's actually on people's minds in the boardroom today. Cybersecurity, sovereignty over data and control over what AI generates are no longer side questions. We're even seeing a move back toward on-premise solutions, which shows just how much concern there is around compliance and data security.

At the same time, internal "competition" is growing. Vibe coding, citizen development, agents that anyone can build: the barrier to cobbling something together yourself has never been lower. So the question isn't how to stop that, but how to channel that creativity toward a platform where governance, security and quality are guaranteed. Building fast without guardrails doesn't solve the problem after all, it just relocates it.

That's exactly the space where Mendix and Xylos are building together.

Thanks to Andrej Koelewijn and Maurits Elzinga for the open and fascinating conversation.

Want to know how Mendix, combined with a thoughtful AI approach, can make the difference for your business? Xylos is happy to help you set up a platform where innovation, governance and security go hand in hand. Get in touch for a no-obligation conversation with our experts.

[Peter Verrykt ](https://be.linkedin.com/in/peter-verrykt)is Business Unit Lead Data & AI at Xylos and helps organizations turn data into concrete business value. He helps companies look beyond technical implementations and uses data and AI as a foundation for better decisions, greater agility and sustainable growth.