Gandhinagar is about forty minutes up the highway from our office. For two days in September it was the busiest tech address in the country, and six of us were in the middle of it.
Odoo brought its India edition of Odoo Experience to the Mahatma Mandir Convention Centre on 11 and 12 September 2026. We sent six people, developers and marketers both, mostly because we couldn’t agree on who deserved to go more.
We came back with a shared Google Doc, a camera roll nobody has finished sorting, and a fairly strong opinion about who this event is really for.
So here’s the honest version. Not everything was brilliant. Most of it was.
The scale hits you before anything else
You badge in, you walk into the main hall, and your idea of what an ERP event looks like in India quietly resets. Odoo called this the country’s biggest tech and business event. Standing in that queue at 8 in the morning, nobody was arguing.
45k+
Attendees
250+
Talks over 2 days
180+
Exhibitors
10
Master classes
Two days is nowhere near enough for 250 talks. You’re not seeing a tenth of it, so the first real decision any team makes is what to give up on. We split into pairs, took different halls, and compared notes over lunch. If you take one thing from this post, take that.
Odoo 20 was the headline, and it deserved to be
This is why most of the room showed up: the first proper look at Odoo 20. Mantavya Gajjar, MD of Odoo India, opened day one at 8:30am to a hall that was already packed.
The release isn’t really a feature list. It’s a direction. Odoo has stopped treating AI as something you switch on in a separate module and started treating it as a layer sitting inside the apps your team already lives in. The demos our developers kept talking about afterwards were the ones where nobody clicked an “AI” button at all. The help was just there, inside the CRM record, inside the accounting entry, inside the stock move.
The interesting part isn’t that Odoo 20 has AI. It’s that Odoo stopped making AI a place you go.
What we wrote down, between the sessions and the roadmap chatter around them:
- AI as an assistance layer across modules rather than a bolt-on app, touching CRM, Accounting, Inventory, Marketing Automation and more.
- Autonomous agents that can carry a routine process from start to finish instead of only suggesting the next step.
- A rebuilt mobile app. Sounds minor, isn’t. Half our Gujarat clients run warehouse and field teams who never open a laptop.
- Simpler payroll and accounting flows, which is the single most requested thing from every Indian SME we’ve ever onboarded.
- Deeper integration between the apps, meaning fewer of the custom bridges agencies like ours have quietly been billing for.
One caveat. A release this big doesn’t land finished on day one. The India edition gave the market its first real look; the version settles over the months that follow. If you’re running on Odoo, plan an upgrade window instead of rushing one.
The speaker list was doing something smart
Odoo didn’t fill the stage with product people. They mixed founders and operators, Chandubhai Virani of Balaji, Ghazal Alagh of Honasa, Dr. A. Velumani of Thyrocare, Dipak Sanghavi of Nilon’s, Viraj Bahl of VRB Consumer, Arjun Vaidya of V3 Ventures, with names that pull a crowd from well outside the ERP world: Suniel Shetty, Tech Burner, Gaurav Taneja, Sharan Hegde.
That’s not an accident. It tells you Odoo isn’t only selling to IT heads anymore. They’re selling to the founder who hasn’t yet decided to leave spreadsheets behind. We sit between product and audience for a living, so honestly we learned as much from how the programme was built as from what was said on it.
Now the part most recaps skip: a lot of it was too basic for us
A good chunk of the sessions were introductory. What a CRM pipeline is. How to put up a website in Odoo. Why inventory should be talking to accounting.
For an owner meeting Odoo for the first time, that’s genuinely useful content. And with 45,000 people in from 150-odd countries, that person is most of the room. Fair enough.
For a team that builds and markets on this stack every week, it was ground we’d covered years ago. We walked out of two. We skipped several more just from reading the agenda. By the middle of day one we’d stopped picking sessions by topic and started picking them by speaker, and that more or less fixed the problem.
If you’re going next year, do this
- Read the agenda by speaker, not by title. Titles here undersell the advanced stuff and oversell the beginner stuff.
- Send a mixed team and split up. Two of your people in the same talk is a wasted seat.
- Book master classes early. Ten slots against 45,000 people is the real bottleneck.
- Give the expo floor more time than feels sensible. See below.
The expo floor was the best few hours of the trip
180-plus exhibitors, and this is where the event paid for itself.
Talks give you the roadmap. The floor gives you reality: what partners across India are actually shipping, which verticals nobody is serving properly, what broke for someone else during a migration so it doesn’t have to break for you. Some of our best conversations happened standing next to a booth with a cup of chai going cold, because they were specific in a way a forty-minute slot never is.
We also met people we’d only known as names in a forum thread. The Odoo community here is scattered across a dozen cities. Putting faces to it is worth the trip by itself.
And yes, they fed us properly
We’re saying this plainly because too many event write-ups pretend it doesn’t matter. It does.
The café setup ran all day and somehow never had the usual crush. Lunch and dinner were both included on the premium pass and both were good. Not conference-good. Actually good. There was a gaming zone, an Odoo shop, and a live set from Odoo Band India that a few of us stayed for longer than planned.
The DJ party on the first evening was properly run, and it did what an after-party is supposed to do. Half our best conversations of the entire event happened there instead of in a session hall. Entry to the event itself started at a free basic pass, with the premium pass covering the meals and the party.
What we’re taking back to our clients in Ahmedabad
We do web and application development alongside performance marketing, and most of our clients sit exactly where Odoo is now aiming: growing Gujarat businesses running four disconnected tools and one very tired spreadsheet. Three things from Gandhinagar change how we’ll talk to them.
ERP has stopped being an IT conversation. When founders are hearing about it from other founders on a stage, the objection isn’t technical anymore, it’s commercial. Our decks are changing to match.
AI inside the workflow beats AI as a product. Same thing applies to marketing. Clients don’t want another dashboard to remember to check. They want the answer where they were already looking. We’ve been building that way for a while; it was good to see Odoo confirm the direction.
Integration is going to eat some of our custom development revenue. Tighter native links between Odoo apps mean a chunk of connector work is about to disappear. That’s fine by us. It moves the value from plumbing to strategy, which is where we’d rather be.
Would we go again?
Yes, with a sharper plan.
Odoo Experience India is big, well produced and genuinely generous with its attendees. If you’re a business evaluating ERP, it’s close to unmissable. If you’re a specialist team, it’s a mixed bag on the session floor and excellent everywhere else: the keynote, the master classes, the expo, the people.
Go with six. Split the halls. Pick by speaker. Spend real time on the floor.
Two days, one drive up from Ahmedabad, six notebooks filled and a very quiet car on the way home. We’ll take that.
Frequently asked questions
When and where was Odoo Experience 2026 India held?
On 11 and 12 September 2026, at the Mahatma Mandir Convention Centre in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, roughly 25 km from Ahmedabad.
Is Odoo Experience India free to attend?
There’s a free basic entry pass. The premium pass is paid and covers catered lunch and dinner plus the DJ party, with ticket prices running up to around ₹16,949 depending on tier and how early you book.
Was Odoo 20 shown at the India event?
Yes. The India edition gave attendees their first look at Odoo 20, with AI running through the modules as the theme of the whole release.
Is the event worth it for a digital marketing agency?
Worth it for the expo floor, the keynote and the networking. A lot of the general sessions are pitched at businesses new to Odoo, so an experienced team should build its two days around specific speakers rather than walking the full agenda.
Work with us
Mistry Marketing is a digital marketing company in Ahmedabad building websites, applications and performance campaigns for businesses across Gujarat. If Odoo 20 has you rethinking how your systems and your marketing fit together, come talk to us.