The opening keynote of Odoo Experience was delivered by Fabien Pinckaers, founder and CEO of Odoo, before sixty-five thousand registrants from around the world. It marked the presentation of the software's twentieth major version.
The speaker first wished to recall the founding principles that have remained unchanged for twenty years, despite the company's considerable growth. The core of the product remains distributed under an open-source license, while the Enterprise offering remains subject to a separate proprietary license, this duality being at the heart of Odoo's business model. No proprietary data format is imposed on users, which guarantees the portability of their databases. No technological lock-in is applied either, whether for online hosting, hosting on Odoo.sh or on-premise installation. Finally, pricing remains deliberately transparent and accessible, with a stated goal of democratization among students, associations and small organizations.
Fabien Pinckaers also stressed the community dimension of the project, claiming twenty-six million users and three hundred thousand jobs created directly or indirectly thanks to the Odoo ecosystem.
Interface redesign
Version 20 introduces a complete visual redesign, although deliberately measured compared with previous major interface changes. The tones have been inverted: the gray background now hosts the navigation areas, while the content sits on a white background, a choice intended to strengthen contrast and focus attention on the data itself.
All icons have been redrawn, for visual consistency on a light background. The internal messaging module, called Discuss, has been completely reorganized around discussion channels, meetings, artificial intelligence sessions and live chat, with the addition of new features such as polls within channels.
Particular attention has been paid to page loading speed, a condition the speaker considered essential to the credibility of any micro-animation added to the interface. In his view, an animation only makes sense if the page loads in under 10 milliseconds, otherwise it harms the experience rather than serving it.
Generative artificial intelligence applied to the website and online sales
One of the highlights of the presentation concerned the new capabilities for automatically generating websites. From a simple description of the company's industry, the assistant instantly proposes professional photographs generated by artificial intelligence, a color palette consistent with the desired positioning, whether luxury, eco-friendly or affordable, as well as a proposal for a complete site including the texts.
The assistant can also act directly on technical elements of the site, such as the JavaScript animation of a numeric counter. Fabien Pinckaers stressed that the assistant asks for explicit permission before any change touching the code or the database, this consent mechanism being presented as a guarantee of control retained by the user.
The creation of entire pages from a simple instruction written in everyday language was demonstrated, with the assistant asking the user about the desired style when information is missing, for example between a modern and minimalist style, warm and natural, or classic and elegant.
On the online shop, several improvements were presented: regenerating a product photograph in a different context using artificial intelligence, enhanced search by product variant with multiple preview thumbnails, and the ability to add extra blocks to the cart page, such as a donation module, by simple drag and drop.
Customer relationship management
The customer relationship management module has been enriched with several features based on artificial intelligence. The assistant can now generate an opportunity forecast over several months and, above all, let the user audit the exact origin of that forecast, unlike generic artificial intelligence tools whose results remain opaque. The user can thus request an additional chart, for example the number of leads created per month, to explain a drop in forecast revenue.
A new lead generation tool was introduced, making it possible to generate contacts from vast databases of entities according to geographic or industry criteria, to automatically convert website visitors into leads by detecting their internet protocol address, or even to create a lead from a simple photograph of a business card.
Sales activity management has also been simplified, with streamlined forms for scheduling tasks such as phone calls. The connectors to Gmail and Outlook now make it possible to automatically log email exchanges directly in Odoo.
Voice over IP telephony
An integrated telephony feature was presented in detail. Acquiring a phone number is done directly from the application, with local pricing displayed in real time depending on the country chosen.
Inbound call flows are built by dragging and dropping functional blocks, making it possible to compose a multilingual voice menu, then route calls according to opening-hours conditions or to specific user groups. Once the conversation is over, the recording is automatically transcribed, with each sentence of the transcript allowing you to navigate directly to the corresponding passage of the audio recording.
Quotations and sales management
Quotation creation has been thoroughly reviewed. New performance indicators now appear at the top of the sales view, offering a summary overview of revenue and the actions remaining to be taken.
The user can now write an entirely free-form description in addition to the product catalog, which is particularly suited to service companies. Switching between tax-excluded and tax-included prices is done in a single click, depending on whether the customer is a business or a private individual.
Quotation sections can now be saved as reusable templates, with quantities adjusting automatically when a section is duplicated. A real-time margin calculation, based directly on the supplier cost, lets the user adjust their selling price accordingly. Finally, a visual presentation builder makes it possible to compose a polished quotation, including header, customer testimonials and special conditions, before sending it directly by email.
Project management and time tracking
In the project management module, the assistant can now analyze an external document, for example a PDF file sent as an attachment, to automatically extract the structure of a project and all its associated tasks, subject, again, to explicit permission before any database write.
Time tracking has undergone a particularly extensive redesign, the speaker having recalled that it is a major friction point identified among Odoo's customers, behind a significant share of billable time lost each week. A new widget now makes it possible to enter a time entry from any module of the application, without having to open a dedicated module, with the system automatically remembering the context of the current project and task.
A local assistant, installed directly on the user's workstation and transmitting no data externally, observes activity throughout the day, whether emails sent, meetings held or documents consulted, to automatically suggest timesheet entries that the user only has to validate or merge.
A new menu called services and equipment also makes it possible to add directly to a quotation fixed-price services or equipment, in addition to billing for time spent.
Purchase and procurement
The purchase module now benefits from automated analysis of transaction history, allowing artificial intelligence to detect abnormal price gaps between several suppliers for the same item, or unexploited volume discounts, and to directly prepare a negotiation email addressed to the supplier concerned.
A new tool for assisted calculation of minimum and maximum replenishment thresholds was also presented, based on actual demand observed over the last 30 days and on a stock coverage target expressed in number of days, adjustable by the user according to their appetite for stockout risk.
Manufacturing
In the manufacturing module, a new bill of materials comparison tool makes it possible to view, as a cross-tab, the use of the same component across several finished products, thus facilitating the identification of critical components.
Production planning has been simplified thanks to a new table-type view, based on the relative prioritization of manufacturing orders rather than a precise assignment to time slots, with the system automatically recalculating availability dates according to the priorities defined. The production shop floor now also supports barcode scanning clock-in for all operations.
Point of sale and restaurants
The point-of-sale application dedicated to restaurants has been completely redesigned. A visual floor plan editor makes it possible to freely compose the layout of tables, decor and circulation areas. Combo handling is now automatic, with items entered individually before being grouped at checkout.
Self-service mode, whether a kiosk installed at the entrance of the establishment or ordering by scanning a QR code from a personal phone, automatically adapts its interface to the medium used, while maintaining a consistent experience.
Accounting and e-invoicing
Accounting was one of the most developed points of the presentation, supported notably by a figure-backed example from the Belgian market, where mandatory e-invoicing has been in force since the start of the year. More than 20 million invoices are now exchanged there in a fully automated way, with no manual intervention.
This automation relies on several mechanisms presented in detail: automatic matching between an incoming invoice and an existing asset, for example a vehicle recorded in the fleet management module, prediction of analytic distribution based on the history of previous entries, automated management of deferred expenses with start and end dates calculated directly from the electronic invoice, and a complete overhaul of fixed asset management, which now makes it possible to link several depreciation plans to the same asset according to tax or consolidation needs.
A payment module integrated directly into the accounting dashboard was also demonstrated, making it possible to select a set of vendor bills and initiate their payment directly from the company's online banking environment, without an intermediate export file.
Finally, several new reports were presented: automatic horizontal grouping by company in a multi-company context, automatic calculation of the translation adjustment on the balance sheet, a new cash flow statement using the indirect method, and instant reconciliation of intercompany balances.
Cross-cutting artificial intelligence, agents and the MCP protocol
Fabien Pinckaers justified Odoo's claimed lead in artificial intelligence with a structural argument: Odoo's source code would represent 2% of all open-source code written in Python worldwide, which gives large language models a native, in-depth knowledge of its structure and programming interfaces.
A striking demonstration consisted of reproducing, in two hours of preparation using Claude Code, a dashboard similar to the one presented by Salesforce at its own Dreamforce conference the previous week, including automatic stockout alerts, resolution recommendations and direct escalation of support tickets. The speaker stressed that this same capability, billed separately and at a high price by the competitor cited, remains included at no extra cost in Odoo's standard subscription.
The MCP protocol, for Model Context Protocol, was officially announced, allowing external artificial intelligences such as Gemini, OpenAI or Claude Code to connect directly to an Odoo instance by simply providing its address, while retaining all the access rights already configured in the system.
Finally, new configurable agents were presented, operating as autonomous personal assistants in the background. Each agent can be given instructions, skills such as image search or knowledge updates, as well as triggers based on a date, a modified field or a schedule. A demonstration illustrated the configuration of an agent in charge of automatically prioritizing support tickets and assigning them to the most relevant operator, from a simple instruction written in natural language.
Offline operation
Offline operation, introduced in a previous version, was highlighted again and enhanced. The user can now not only view but also edit documents with no internet connection at all, with changes accumulating locally before being transparently synchronized as soon as the connection is restored, without ever slowing down everyday use of the system.
New pricing
The presentation ended with the announcement of a pricing change. The free and standard plans remain strictly unchanged, the latter staying at 20 euros per user per month, including hosting, support and artificial intelligence features.
The custom plan, currently set at 29.90 euros, will see a 20% increase. This increase was justified by the speaker by cumulative inflation of 26% since the previous price revision in 2022, as well as by a net loss of 36 million euros recorded by the company in the last fiscal year.
In return for this increase, a new restricted user rate was introduced, set at 7.90 euros per month. This rate gives access to human resources apps, such as time off, expenses and attendance clocking, as well as point of sale, barcode inventory and the production shop floor, without requiring a full user license. This feature is only available starting with Odoo version 20.