The Banamex Center hosted on September 2 and 3 the first Mexican edition of Odoo Experience, the largest gathering that the Belgian company has organized in Latin America. It was two days of conferences, demonstrations, and networking around a single question: what does it mean for a Mexican company for its management system to start thinking for itself.
The event changed its name, and with it its audience
Until last year, this gathering was called Odoo Community Days. It was born in 2024, precisely in Mexico, as the company's debut in the region, and was mainly aimed at developers and implementation partners. It was a technical space, designed for those who build on the platform.
The 2026 edition adopted the name and format that Odoo uses in its international event in Belgium. The change was not just a label: the program was reoriented towards general directors, finance directors, operations managers, and marketing teams. Less code, more business criteria.
The figures provided by the organization give an idea of the scale. More than 10,000 attendees from various countries in the region, just over 100 conferences, around 70 exhibitors, and four workshops. General access was free. For those seeking deeper training, there were master classes on the two days prior, August 31 and September 1, at the Odoo Mexico offices.
Website and e-commerce: selling without relying on third parties
Two of the most attended sessions were those dedicated to the news in the website builder and in the online store. The interest has a simple explanation: for a good part of the medium-sized Mexican companies, the website and the digital sales channel continue to exist on a platform different from that of inventory and billing. Each online sale ends up being captured twice.
The proposal presented points in the opposite direction. A catalog, an inventory, and an accounting that simultaneously feed the physical and digital store, with the possibility of editing the site without writing a line of code. Among what is anticipated for the next version are additional design blocks and better management of sites in multiple languages, something relevant for companies that export or serve markets outside of the country.
Accounting: from recording the past to anticipating the future
The session on accounting updates addressed the shift that the area is experiencing. Accounting has ceased to be understood solely as the record of what has already happened and is starting to be used as a tool for anticipation.
Among what is planned for the next version are performance projections, greater ease in generating tax reports, and the incorporation of taxes corresponding to different tax locations. This last point deserves particular attention in Mexico, where any management system has to coexist with the SAT rules to be viable.
The future of work, told from the labor culture
One of the conversations that gathered the most audience did not discuss software. Macarena Riva and Rosalaura López, hosts of Chisme Corporativo —recognized by Spotify as podcast of the year in business—, participated in the program with a talk about the labor world and its transformation.
The choice makes sense within the thread of the event. Their podcast was built precisely on what rarely appears in a corporate presentation: how work is experienced from the inside, what happens to teams when the rules change, why decisions that look flawless on a slide get stuck in daily operations.
The fact that best explains their presence at a business technology event is their own growth: they reached the first audience spot in just five weeks talking about business models, corporate decisions, and business controversies. Topics that for years were considered dry. And they achieved this without diluting the content, with figures and real cases, translated into a conversation that anyone can follow.
There is a lesson that connects directly with the rest of the program. If a business podcast reaches the top spot in just over a month, the problem was never that people are not interested in understanding how a company works. The problem is how it is told. With technology within organizations, the same thing happens: what is often diagnosed as resistance to change almost always turns out to be a matter of translation.
The session on the future of work and artificial intelligence completed that approach. The general premise was that the discussion about automation often stays focused on the tools and overlooks what is decisive, which are the people who will use them. A system with artificial intelligence capabilities in each module is useless if the team continues to work as before.
Odoo 20: what has been confirmed and what has not yet
Version 20 was presented during the opening of the event. It coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the platform, and although the full formal announcement occurs weeks later in Belgium, some elements have already been established.
The most significant is conceptual. Artificial intelligence stops functioning as a separate module, which the user had to enter deliberately, and starts to run within each application while the person works. The difference may seem minor but it is not: it eliminates the step of having to remember to use it.
At the point of sale, a visual builder oriented towards restaurants was confirmed, allowing the layout of the venue to be assembled interactively, arranging tables and areas directly on screen. The Events module, for its part, was integrated into the point of sale, with ticket sales and self-ordering modes.
There is considerably more information circulating about this version: artificial intelligence agents, native WhatsApp integration, automatic replenishment based on demand forecasts, improvements for operating offline. It is important to be clear about this. None of that has been officially confirmed by Odoo. These are forecasts published by implementing partners that, while they have a basis, do not equate to an announcement.
The Mexican context explains why this matters
Odoo reports an annual growth of nearly 50% in Mexico, a figure that the company shared in conversation with the media during the event and that does not correspond to a published report. It is a considerable expansion. When placed alongside the country's technology adoption data, it also proves revealing.
According to the Economic Census from INEGI published in 2024, only 2.1% of Mexican economic units used artificial intelligence systems in 2023. The Bank of Mexico, in a report from September 2025, placed that proportion at 24.3% among companies with more than 100 employees and at 43.4% among those with more than a thousand workers. An additional fact further illustrates the moment: eight out of ten organizations declared having implemented some artificial intelligence solution during 2025, but only four out of ten considered they were truly leveraging it.
The reading is that technology is entering Mexican companies faster than those companies can assimilate it. That is where a design decision like integrating artificial intelligence within each module, instead of offering it as a separate tool, ceases to be a technical detail. It does not solve the adoption problem, but it reduces the gap.
For the Mexican company that still operates with spreadsheets and systems that do not communicate with each other, the relevant question was never whether artificial intelligence is useful. It is whether it arrives in a format that their team will use without the need for prior training.
What remains pending for Brussels
The formal launch of Odoo 20 takes place from September 24 to 26 at Brussels Expo, during the international edition of the Odoo Experience. This event gathers more than 45,000 people from 150 countries and has more than 400 conferences scheduled.
There it is confirmed or discarded everything that is circulating today as forecast. The second part of this article will collect that definitive list: what was effectively announced, what was left out and, above all, what of all this makes sense for a company operating in Mexico.