Here are all the essential ERP and Odoo news of July you should not miss.
News from Odoo HQ
Official updates and posts from Odoo’s headquarters, Odoo employees, and Odoo founder Fabien Pinckaers.
Odoo reaches 8000+ employees on LinkedIn
Spotted on LinkedIn this week: Odoo’s employee count on the platform has officially crossed the 8,000 mark.
To put that in perspective, SAP took 24 years to reach an 8,000-strong workforce. For Salesforce and Workday, it took about 13 years each.
Odoo added just 7,000 of its current 8,000 staff in just the last six years. With their expansion to new offices and onboarding 100+ hires a day, this growth is showing no signs of slowing down.
Odoo AI now shows every step behind your answer
Odoo CEO Fabien Pinckaers has shared a sneak peek of a small but powerful new AI feature. The Odoo AI chatbot will display a "Steps Taken" button that, when clicked, breaks down the full thought process used to generate your answer.
According to the community, this is especially valuable in detail-oriented workflows like inventory management, where users need to understand why the AI picked a certain source, not just what it concluded.
As one user put it: "It's not so much about the AI's answer, but rather that a warehouse manager can see why it picked WH/Stock as the source and actually trust the number."
Odoo backports direct ELSTER tax submission for German users in v19
German Odoo users got a much-anticipated accounting upgrade: direct VAT advance return filing (UStVA) via ELSTER has been backported to v19 ahead of the Odoo 20 release.
The update connects Odoo straight to the German tax office, finally putting an end to manual portal entry and CSV exports.
Community feedback was immediate, and some Odoo users called it "an overdue addition" that removes one of the most annoying, error-prone tasks from the monthly German accounting routine.
Odoo 20 will introduce new connectors, UI views & AI agents
With two months to go until this year’s Odoo Experience, the upcoming version 20 is becoming clearer by the day.
These are the latest sneak peeks shared by Odoo’s R&D team:
CEO Fabien Pinckaers revealed how users can automate their annual accounting audit with Odoo AI using simple prompts like:
I am a new CFO, tell me everything I should know for 2026
Start the year-end audit
Perform the full Equity cycle checks.
Odoo Discuss will have a new menu view in Systray, app, and mobile views. It will centralise:
AI chats
WhatsApp messages
Live Chat conversations
Discuss channels
Internal messages
And more.
Odoo will offer a native Marketplace integration with TikTok Shop. It will fetch orders, delivery slips and sync inventory levels.
Odoo 19.4 release notes are here
Odoo has published the release notes for version 19.4. Here is a breakdown of some of the most interesting updates:
AI
Odoo now automatically picks the best AI model for each task based on your chosen provider
Voice input lets users dictate requests to AI agents hands-free
A native MCP connector allows external tools to connect directly to your live Odoo database.
Accounting
Bill line prediction pre-fills product, account, tax, and analytic distribution based on your billing history
Duplicate detection now uses a two-tier warning before posting, with red for likely duplicates and yellow for ones to investigate
Withholding tax bills show a clear Amount Due / Withhold Due / Net Due breakdown, with the option to pay each portion separately.
Sales & eCommerce
Sales order lines no longer require a linked product, useful for custom services or one-off descriptions
Type a target margin directly on a line, and the selling price recalculates automatically
Customers can now initiate returns from their portal without contacting your team.
Inventory & Manufacturing
Prefilled CMR documents can be generated directly from deliveries for international road freight
Continuous Production mode starts the next operation as soon as partial quantities are ready, without waiting for a full batch.
System-wide
A tax included/excluded toggle has been added to sales orders, purchase orders, and invoices
CC recipients can now be added when sending emails from Odoo, logged in the chatter for a full audit trail
Bulk attachment download will let users select invoices and export all attachments as a zip in one action.
Odoo 19.4 is now live on Runbot & GitHub
Odoo 19.4 is officially available on GitHub and Runbot. Fabrice Henrion from the R&D team confirmed that SaaS deployment and full release notes will follow shortly.
Since the announcement, the Odoo community has already been digging through the code. As far as we know, it will:
Rewrite how permissions work: merging access control lists and record rules into a single model called ir.access.
Introduce a unified Schema.org JSON-LD layer across the website: bringing structured data for jobs, events, products, courses, and Q&A into one consistent foundation.
Version 19.4 is likely the last before Odoo 20, and possibly the closest to the highly anticipated release.
Odoo Experience is coming to India
Odoo’s flagship event is coming to India from September 11-12.
This announcement comes after regional Odoo Community Days were rebranded into official Odoo Experience events across the world.
This signified a major shift in Odoo’s international strategy and growth, and India was an obvious next stop.
India is home to Odoo’s HQ in the Asian region and one of the fastest-growing markets, with 120% revenue growth last year and over 170 Gold partners across the country.
OXP India will take place in Gandhinagar, and Master Classes will start on September 10 in Odoo’s local HQ.
More info about all Odoo Experience 2026 events:
Odoo Experience India (Gandhinagar)
Odoo Experience Belgium (Brussels)
Odoo Experience Africa (Nairobi, Kenya)
Odoo 20 introduces a native MCP server
Odoo 20 is making AI even more agentic. The R&D team revealed that users in the Enterprise edition will have access to a native MCP server.
The native MCP server will connect AI assistants directly to an /mcp endpoint, eliminating the need for an external Python gateway. This out-of-the-box solution means that Odoo becomes the MCP server itself, without any added layers.
Users responded positively, claiming that they’d “been eagerly awaiting this” and called it “an excellent feature that’s likely to make the competition tremble once again”.
And while this is a clean way to give an assistant read access to Odoo, the native MCP server still has a few limitations
We dug into all the details about Odoo’s new MCP server: exciting features, security layers, and current limitations.
Odoo reaches 2 million paying users milestone
According to Odooer Ray Carnes, the milestone arrived ahead of schedule.
As of today, Odoo counts 2,113,916 paying users. Out of those, 1,422,084 (67% of users) are supported by the Odoo Partner network. The growth shared in the Odoo Partner Day suggests the pace will only keep on accelerating.
Community talk
All the hot topics and discussions Odoo users are buzzing about this month.
SAP tries to recruit Odoo partners
Reports are circulating that SAP is running a campaign to pull Odoo and other ERP partners into its Business One network.
A LinkedIn user shared that he received a PR package with a SAP Business One jersey and an invitation letter to play in the "Premier League".
This marketing tactic comes just as the European Commission wrapped up an antitrust investigation into SAP. It found that the company had made it structurally impossible for customers to leave. The ERP giant managed to avoid the fines, but the news was already out.
However, targeting Odoo is a curious strategy, as they could not be more different.
Odoo is open-source, and CEO Fabien Pinckaers notoriously opposes vendor lock-in, which is a stark difference from SAP’s proprietary and rigid model.
An Odoo.sh commit is reportedly breaking JS for some users
A LinkedIn post is making the rounds in the Odoo community, flagging an issue that recently appeared on Odoo.sh instances.
According to the post, a commit pushed by Odoo may be causing a SecurityError for some users.
This is happening specifically to those using third-party modules that embed iFrames (like Ringover), or running the Knowledge app in v19 and clicking the three-dot menu:
SecurityError: Failed to read a named property 'addEventListener' from 'Window': Blocked a frame with origin
The suggested workaround is to roll back to the previous week's commit on Odoo.sh, and the GitHub pull request appears to be tracking the fix on Odoo's side.
Reactions suggest a few people have hit this on customer instances, though the scope is not entirely clear yet. Worth keeping an eye on if you are running iFrame-based integrations on Odoo.sh.
News from the ERP world
Headlines from the ERP world you shouldn’t miss.
SAP admits AI chatbots and costly frontier models won't deliver returns
SAP CFO Dominik Asam shared that AI in enterprise software needs to move beyond chatbots and coding assistants if businesses expect to see a real impact.
Speaking after SAP's Q2 financial results, Asam pointed out several issues with trying to push generic AI models into core operations like finance and supply chain:
Errors in financial workflows multiply over multiple steps, creating major operational risks
AI cannot fix unorganised legacy data, and running generic models over messy databases leads to massive computing costs
Most current AI usage is limited to low-risk tasks like writing code, where mistakes carry little consequence.
He argued that companies will ultimately use whichever simple software or cheap open-source tool gets the job done safely, rather than paying for expensive frontier models.
But for Odoo users, this highlights a basic structural advantage.
While legacy vendors try to sell proprietary AI add-ons, Odoo already has native AI agents and MCP server support built directly into its platform.
Because Odoo is open-source, businesses can integrate any AI model straight into their ERP logic via MCP. Users get tailored AI automation across their entire database without high costs or getting locked into closed third-party systems.
AI in ERP market is projected to grow tenfold by 2035
Industry reports put the AI-in-ERP market at €5.8 billion in 2025, and have projected it to reach €58 billion by 2035.
What's more, analysts are predicting that by 2028, AI could:
Improve ERP forecast accuracy by up to 90%
Reduce invoice processing effort by up to 80%
Shorten financial close cycles by 30% by 2028.
The latest round of product releases shows software providers are racing to turn traditional back-office software into AI-native platforms:
Oracle NetSuite began rolling out NetSuite Next in North America (2026.2 release), introducing conversational AI, variance analysis, and AI-driven labour cost insights
Conexiom and Epicor expanded their partnership to automate order and invoice processing across Eclipse and Prophet 21, processing over 1.5 billion line items annually at 95% accuracy
Cflow released version 15.0, adding AI agents for approval recommendations based on historical workflow data, plus a digital signature module and secured email approvals.
But none of this is news to Odoo users.
They have had access to these features for multiple release cycles: conversational interfaces, automated invoice processing, approval routing with historical context.
The gap that remains isn't capability, but rather where it will grow.
Salesforce Agentforce fails to get traction with enterprise customers
Salesforce has built its near-term growth strategy around Agentforce, an AI agent platform for building and deploying agents across its ecosystem.
But this week, two separate reports suggested that it’s not landing with their target audience.
One study concluded that adoption will take longer than expected and is unlikely to expand meaningfully beyond Salesforce's core CRM market. Another survey found that companies plan to deprioritise Agentforce in their IT budgets over the next 12 months.
Agentforce’s pricing model is adding to the friction: most customers aren’t willing to pay for AI capabilities within their software provider on top of an already expensive contract.
A spokesperson disputed the picture, calling Agentforce "the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history", but Salesforce stock has dropped by over 36% this year.
For the Odoosphere, this is a useful signal: even a market-dominating company like Salesforce can't push AI adoption through pricing pressure alone.
Customers want AI integrated in tools they already trust, not sold to them as a separate add-on.
SAP avoids EU fine for anti-trust practices
SAP has escaped a European Commission fine after the EC found it was abusing its dominant market position. The EC opened a formal investigation last September over SAP's after-market support practices.
The company was making it structurally impossible for customers to:
Terminate support for unused licences
Switched providers without facing reinstatement fees
Cancel or renew their licence terms without it automatically extending
Stay in the same support tier across their entire SAP landscape.
SAP managed to avoid the fees by making legally binding commitments around how it handles maintenance and support services for on-premises customers for the next ten years.
Under the new commitments, customers can choose different maintenance providers and support levels. They can also terminate licences if SAP reduces service levels, cut costs if headcount drops by 10% or more, and transfer licences when divesting part of their business.
European Commission representatives called it "a benchmark for the industry" and warned that the same scrutiny will extend to cloud markets. For Odoo users, this is worth watching for two reasons:
SAP customers now have a clearer path to exit from an ecosystem where they had been heavily locked in
Regulators are signalling that the all-or-nothing, restrictive contract model that defined ERPs for decades is no longer untouchable.
SAP tightens budget for hiring and travel to fund AI push
SAP is cutting costs to free up investment capacity for AI.
The ERP giant announced stricter rules on new recruitment and business travel, following reports from Bloomberg that an outright hiring freeze was being considered.
This is part of a broader restructuring programme SAP launched 18 months ago to reposition itself for the AI era, with CEO Christian Klein making it its central strategic bet.
The programme involves reviewing thousands of roles: cutting positions in slow-growth areas while building out teams in higher-potential ones. CEO
However, this pressure is not unique to SAP. Software providers across the board are facing investor concerns that AI models will allow companies to build their own business tools cheaply and bypass vendors.
Klein has pushed back on this narrative consistently: "We're not losing contracts because of AI. We're winning contracts because of AI."
Whether that holds as AI capabilities continue to expand remains the real question - and SAP is betting its cost structure on the answer.
Portugal launches its first open-source AI for EU tech sovereignty
Portugal has joined the growing European push for AI sovereignty with the launch of Amalia, its first open-source LLM.
The model was developed by a consortium of Portuguese universities and research institutions, backed by €5.5 million in EU recovery funds.
It is designed for public institutions, companies, and researchers to build their own AI-powered applications on top of it, tailored to their specific needs. The model, its training data, and source code are all released under an open-source licence.
Early applications already announced include a virtual guide for Portuguese museums, decision-support tools for the navy, an AI teaching assistant, and a digital assistant for public services.
The move follows similar efforts in France with Mistral and in Germany with Aleph Alpha, and echoes the European Parliament's recent switch to Qwant over Google.
The message from European governments is becoming consistent: to be strategically autonomous, the EU has to own the AI stack, not rent it.
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