Mendix Meetup Insights: Who actually needs an orchestration platform?

Part 4 of 4, Straight from the Mendix Community Round Table Meetup in Amersfoort on June 2nd, 2026. Parts 1 to 3 questioned what is left for the consultants to do, whether we can trust an AI agent to do it, and whether the platform still earns the choice. This article asks the commercial question underneath all three: who actually needs such a platform?

A seller at one of the tables had called the Dutch IT director of a top-tier investment bank to invite him to an event. Friendly guy, so he got a few minutes, and the director used them to explain why the answer was no. "No issue with low code," he said. "We're just not doing that anymore. We do everything with AI now, the full application lifecycle." And how do you govern all that? "We have four thousand engineers, and the resources to have full teams checking it." The seller told us afterwards that he could not counter it and did not pretend otherwise.

That answer stayed with me for the rest of the evening, and it has been hanging over this series ever since. I have written three times about June 2nd: what is left for the consultant to do, whether we can trust an agent to do it, and whether Mendix is still a defensible platform to do it on. Each of them ends up in roughly the same place: the value holds if you build it right. So the commercial question remains. If all of that is true, who actually needs it?

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The upper end of the market answered honestly

The bank was being accurate rather than dismissive. A company with four thousand engineers can do everything with AI and put full teams on checking the output, because it can afford to. Those enterprises have their AI in place and their budgets spent, so the question they ask is fair: why would we add a platform for this when we already build one ourselves?

The instinct many of us were trained on, chase the biggest logos and land the enterprise, deserves a second look. The companies with the most resources need a platform that takes the hassle away the least, because they are used to carrying the hassle themselves. At least when they are a software-focussed enterprise already. If they are not, a platform like Mendix still gives an incredible head start without the years it takes to build a platform approach yourself. Because yes, that's what it needs to reach a situation that is only getting close to what platforms like those of Siemens can offer.

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A nuance I want to add myself

Read that answer back and it sounds like AI mostly closed the door. I do not think it did. Was that bank ever going to buy a low-code platform? In 2019, with the same four thousand engineers, before any of this? Almost certainly not to replace its entire tech stack.

A few things keep a company that size building its own, and most of them have little to do with AI.

• Habit and history. An organization that has built software its own way for twenty years has an estate, standards, a review process and existing resources and components. Nobody rips that out because a vendor turned up with a better story.
• Talent, which is more local than we usually admit. If you can hire four thousand engineers, and hire them where the labor cost works out, building in-house is a defensible choice. For a company in the Netherlands hiring in the Netherlands that calculation can look completely different, and so can the values and beliefs behind it.
• The cost they already paid, which the bank did not mention. Years of procedures, internal standards, a platform team, an internal developer platform that somebody has to keep alive. They did not skip the hassle. They bought it in-house and spread the cost over a decade, which is an expensive position that only a company with the scale, strategy and time could get into.

So the four thousand engineers do not prove the platform case is dead. They show that a company big enough, with the right strategy, can build a similar platform experience for itself. This one did, and it took years and real money. It says little about low code, and a lot about who can afford to do without it.

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A moving market

I do not even feel it changed too much, with one important addition that I will come back to later. The opening sits with the company that says something close to "I am a construction firm, I am not an IT company," and wants a single supplier to have covered the security, the governance and the integrations already. They cannot put internal teams on checking high-code AI output, and they do not want to either. They want to buy off the hassle, which, as I argued last time, is the real low-code pitch once you stop thinking it is only about first-delivery speed.

A useful dividing line through the middle of that market is roughly the number of apps you run. A one-app company drifts toward the pure-prompting tools as a head start, because for one app, why not just prompt it and see how it holds? But once you have a dozen apps, integrations, and things that have to talk to each other and be governed together, you need something that holds the whole estate together. An orchestration platform that can manage them all starts to make sense there in a way it never did for a single app. That is the enterprise profile where all of this still fits. It is too small to have outgrown the platform for domain-specific reasons, and too big to prompt its one app into existence before caring about the full picture. I call it the orchestrating middle, and it is where most companies will find themselves.

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The objections

Some objections come up every time, and I would rather answer them than wish them away.

The first is perception. There is a feeling in some rooms that choosing low-code in 2026 is the unadventurous option, the sensible and slightly dull choice while everyone else does something shiny with AI. That perception is only partly real, given the huge AI investments from Siemens as well. The platform might not be on par with the possibilities of the big frontier models the day after they release a new version. That said, even since the Meetup in June (this article was published in September), AI assisted development with Mendix matured enormously. I am quite sure the discussion would be more nuanced if we hosted this session again.

The second is lock-in, and it is a fair concern. "It's half the price, and then I own the IP" is something buyers genuinely say when they weigh a managed platform against high code. High code feels like freedom, a managed platform can feel like a cage, and AI has, if anything, made the high-code side look less locked-in than it used to. Denying the lock does not help. Being clear about what it buys you does, and so does being clear about what migrating away would cost. With a reasonably open platform like Mendix that cost is lower than people expect, and with Maia Transform it is now fairly doable to migrate code bases to and from Mendix. Having that option can be a good peace of mind while you enjoy the benefits of the platform.

The third one is quieter. A customer who already has a mature AI strategy elsewhere does not want to bolt new AI onto yet another platform's resource pool. They want to use what they have already invested in. Pitch only greenfield, "add AI here," and you will keep meeting buyers who came at AI from a different direction and got there first. Respecting that allows for a much deeper conversation about what is needed, especially as Mendix lets you use "their" AI, bring your own, or blend them into a mix you like.

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The actual pitch

It is sharper than what came before, even if it sounds like a downgrade at first.

You sell having already done it: the supplier who has solved the governance, the security and the integration, so the construction firm does not have to. For the right customer, "we have done the hard part already" is a stronger line than "we are faster," which stopped being true the moment a prompt could ship faster than any of us. Even though these are mostly prototypes and not enterprise grade apps from the first delivery. When shipping your Mendix app on day one, you get ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 9001, and SOC 2 Type II reports, plus support for GDPR, HIPAA and PCI-DSS without even knowing what they entail. This is and always will be one of the huge drivers of owning Mendix as your enterprise app platform.

There is also one wedge the four-thousand-engineer crowd cannot take, because it has nothing to do with resources and everything to do with trust. Data. A consultant at another table, talking about a government client, put it plainly: they are "very scared, what's going to happen to the data." So you do not lead with the AI. You build the trust first, keep the data in their hands on infrastructure they control, and let the AI come second. For a whole class of customers, in government, in healthcare, anywhere the data cannot leave the building, that is the entire reason they can say yes at all. Local LLMs rapidly land here, and Mendix and Maia can use them just as well.

For those who reached this part of the series and think: but what about Siemens? Most of the Dutch Mendix Community has experience in other domains than manufacturing, so it does not come as a surprise that this angle did not reach a table. It should not be ignored either. With Mendix in its portfolio, including the broad (AI) capabilities discussed above, I can only be happy for the customers that are already well invested in the Siemens ecosystem.

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Closing the series

The bank with four thousand engineers was never going to be the main growth, and chasing it is how you end up feeling replaceable. The growth is with everyone below that line who cannot do it themselves and does not want to: the orchestrating middle, the regulated, the ones who want one trusted supplier to have covered the hard parts and to keep their data where it belongs.

Those were four questions from one evening: what is left for us to do, whether we can trust the agent to do it, whether the platform still earns the choice, and who actually needs it. Now that I have written them down, I notice that none of the answers are really about the technology. They come down to judgment, trust, and knowing who you are for. Which is a reassuring thing for a room full of consultants worried about AI to have talked their way into.

Thank you for reading, if you made it through the full series. These articles reflect the discussions in the room, completed with my own opinion, so I am very much looking forward to your thoughts. Does it resonate with what you are seeing? Are you happy, or worried about the possible new perspectives? Either way, I am eager to host another Round Table later this year, or early next year, to go through some statements in person again.

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Originally published here.