How Mendix is transforming customer experiences with generative AI and Amazon Bedrock

This post was co-written with Ricardo Perdigao, Solution Architecture Manager at Mendix, a Siemens business.

Mendix, a Siemens business, offers the low-code platform with the vision and execution designed for today’s complex software development challenges. Since 2005, we’ve helped thousands of organizations worldwide reimagine how they develop applications with our platform’s cutting-edge capabilities. Mendix allows enterprises to turn ideas into outcomes by delivering sophisticated applications to market faster than ever. Mendix has been named an industry leader by Gartner and Forrester.

In a world where customer-centric innovation is the key to staying ahead of the competition, businesses increasingly turn to advanced technology to revolutionize product offerings. For Mendix, integrating the cutting-edge generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock has been a game changer in redefining our customer experience landscape.

In this post, we share how Mendix is revolutionizing customer experiences using Amazon Bedrock and generative AI.

Overview

In 2016, a new era of innovation began when Mendix announced a strategic collaboration with AWS. By taking advantage of the robust cloud infrastructure of AWS, Mendix was able to provide a secure, scalable, and reliable solution for enterprises across the globe. The primary objective of this partnership was to enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage enterprise-grade applications quickly and effectively.

This unique collaboration combines the agility of the Mendix low-code application development platform with the robustness of AWS Cloud services. This combination facilitates rapid application development and deployment, empowering businesses to respond swiftly to market changes and customer demands, achieving successful digital transformation at an accelerated pace.

However, the rapid evolution of technology brings new challenges. The rise of generative AI presents a unique opportunity to redefine how applications are developed and used. Integrating these advanced AI capabilities into a low-code environment is a complex task, requiring a solution that is innovative, scalable, secure, and easy to use, that nonetheless delivers significant value to users.

Recognizing the importance of staying competitive in this rapidly evolving technological landscape, Mendix is committed to enhancing its platform with seamless AI integrations. Mendix not only offers an AI-enabled low-code application development experience, but also seeks to equip our customers with user-friendly tools necessary for implementing generative AI in the solutions they build.

By combining the power of AI with the accessibility of low-code development, we are setting the stage for unprecedented innovation in the industry, empowering our customers to create AI-enhanced applications with ease and efficiency.

The solution: Integrating generative AI capabilities provided by Amazon Bedrock

As a first step on our journey, we embraced Amazon Bedrock to infuse our low-code platform with generative AI capabilities. Amazon Bedrock offers many ready-to-use AI models. These models excel at writing clear text, creating images from just descriptions, and translating between different languages.

The Mendix AWS Bedrock Connector in the Mendix Marketplace eliminates traditional complexities and streamlines the integration of generative AI within our ecosystem. This pivotal service, accompanied by a wealth of shared knowledge via samples and blog posts, has paved a frictionless path for integration.

Generative AI from Amazon Bedrock is reshaping the landscape for low-code developers, offering a remarkable foundation for rapidly creating sophisticated applications that were previously only possible with extensive development time. These AI models are designed to equip developers with the ability to develop applications that not only learn and adapt but to do so with a previously unseen depth of understanding. As we integrate these technologies into the Mendix environment, we’re ushering in a new era of democratizing generative AI.

Imagine a world where applications are no longer static but can dynamically generate personalized content, such as images and interfaces, by analyzing individual user data like browsing habits, geographic location, and the time of day. This capability of generative AI to tailor experiences to each user promises to boost engagement and satisfaction dramatically. In today’s data-driven enterprise world, where the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming, generative AI stands as a powerful technology, turning complex data into accessible insights, streamlining reports for executives, identifying trends, and predicting future outcomes faster than ever before.

Taking a step further, generative AI also offers actionable recommendations, not just interpretations. This feature is set to transform sectors like customer service, where it can advise service agents on the best subsequent actions or automate routine responses based on a profound comprehension of customer data. By bringing these innovations to the Mendix platform, we’re moving towards a future where applications anticipate and meet user needs proactively, turning every interaction into an opportunity for innovation and a delightful customer experience.

But our vision extends beyond the horizons of today’s achievements. With our sight set on redefining the fabric of low-code application development, we’ve immersed ourselves in pioneering research. Using the Mendix Extensibility framework, we explore generative AI’s potential to transform our industry from the ground up. Our investigative forays have already yielded exciting prospects—from conjuring comprehensive domain models with simple narrative inputs to automating data mapping and sample generation with AI’s interpretative prowess. We’re even on the cusp of enabling Mendix UI setups through intuitive AI-powered dialogs. These nascent concepts—demonstrated in the following video—are still being experimented on. But they promise to herald a new dawn for low-code innovation in the future.

In the following sections, we discuss our needs when selecting the right platform to build generative AI, and how Amazon Bedrock exceeded our expectations.

Ease of implementation

At Mendix, our diverse applications span text generation, summarization, virtual assistance, and multimodal image generation. Amazon Bedrock is our go-to platform for building and implementing generative AI, providing seamless access to cutting-edge generative AI foundational models. Its unified API simplifies experimentation and upgrades, facilitating quick and efficient integration of various models into our systems. This streamlined approach significantly reduces development and deployment efforts, enhancing overall efficiency and quickly innovating on disruptive technologies like generative AI.

Security is our top priority

At Mendix, as we innovate, generative AI is vital for innovation, yet security is critical. With Amazon Bedrock, we customized models using labeled data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). We also added encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and AWS Private Link to establish private connectivity from a VPC to Amazon Bedrock hardened data, security, and access, fulfilling our stringent enterprise security needs.

As we learned with Amazon Bedrock, a private copy of the base model is launched as we fine-tune a foundation model. Our data is not shared with foundation models from Amazon and other leading AI startups or used to improve the base models. Amazon Titan and other leading AI foundation models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI do not have access to our data (prompts, completion results), ensuring responsible development and exceeding our security requirements.

Thanks to AWS and Amazon Bedrock, balancing the power of generative AI with robust security measures ensures responsible and safe development, fostering technological advancement with confidence. Amazon Bedrock exceeded our security requirements.

Continual updates and support

With Amazon Bedrock, users can benefit from continual updates and support for the available models. Enterprises like us have access to the latest advancements and improvements in AI technology, allowing us to remain ahead of the curve and adjust to evolving market trends and demands.

We can’t wait to further experiment with the new features of Amazon Bedrock announced at AWS re:Invent 2023, including Agents for Amazon Bedrock and Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock, to accelerate our generative AI innovation on AWS.

Cost-effectiveness

The diverse model offerings in Amazon Bedrock empower you to select cost-effective large language models based on your use case. This flexibility enables companies to optimize AI investments, allocate resources efficiently, and achieve the best return on investment by choosing the most suitable model for each use case.

Conclusion

Mendix’s strategic integration of generative AI using Amazon Bedrock represents a groundbreaking move in democratizing tech innovation. Aligning with our legacy of empowering businesses with agility, Amazon Bedrock enhances our platform with advanced AI, ensuring every Mendix solution is not just current but future-engineered. We’re not merely adapting to low-code development evolution, but pioneering it.

To learn more about how your business can use the power of Amazon Bedrock and AWS to drive innovation and revolutionize customer experiences, see Why Using Amazon Bedrock in Your Mendix Apps is a Must.

About the Authors

Ricardo Perdigao has worked in the Enterprise Software industry for nearly 30 years, bringing a wealth of experience and innovation to his role as a Solutions Architect at Mendix, a high-productivity application development platform that empowers the creation and continuous improvement of mobile and web applications at scale. In 2023, Ricardo was honored with the prestigious Mendix Innovation Award for his groundbreaking research in Generative AI, further cementing his reputation as a forward-thinking leader in technology.

Suresh Patnam is the principal GTM Specialist AI/ML and Generative AI at AWS. He is passionate about helping businesses of all sizes transform into fast-moving digital organizations focusing on data, AI/ML, and generative AI. Suresh holds an MBA from Duke University-Fuqua School of Business. In his spare time, Suresh enjoys playing tennis and spending time with his family.