India's Largest Tech Event Returns to Gandhinagar, As Odoo Bets Open-Source ERP will Power India's AI ambitions

India is not short on enthusiasm for technology. The harder problem has always been adoption at scale, moving new tools from the conference rooms of well-funded companies down to the businesses that form the actual spine of the economy.

Amidst the current AI adoption frenzy, Odoo is hosting what is dubbed as India's largest tech and business event on September 11 and 12 at Gandhinagar's Mahatma Mandir  Convention Center. But why? For a software company to invest in assembling 45,000 people in a room, there has to be a reason beyond product marketing. That reason may have a lot to do with the state of India's digital infrastructure and how far it still needs to go.

The AI conversation in India is real and, in some places, productive, but it tends to circle the same tier of businesses: the ones that already have clean data, connected systems, and the technical capacity to experiment. That is a small fraction of the commercial activity that actually drives employment and output across the country. For the much wider base of  businesses below that tier, the conversation that matters more is a simpler one: how do you get operations onto a coherent digital system in the first place?

Getting India's MSME base onto functioning digital systems is a stated national priority and the gap between that ambition and the ground reality is still wide. The harder part is that software adoption at scale does not happen through awareness campaigns or product launches. It happens through ecosystems: communities of implementers, partners and early adopters who share knowledge, compare approaches and build the local capacity that makes adoption stick past the first deployment. An in-person event, at this scale and free to enter, is one of the few mechanisms that can build that kind of ecosystem at speed.

The event is an extension of that argument. More than 200 sessions across two days, over 180 exhibitors, a dedicated startup zone, and a basic entry pass that is free. Making such an event accessible to the business owners who most need the exposure is key, as opposed to gatekeeping it to the ones who would have found their way there regardless.

Before the main event, on September 10, Odoo runs ten dedicated masterclasses for technical teams and implementation partners. These are full training courses, not panel  discussions. Topics span advanced accounting, manufacturing, inventory, point-of-sale, AI integration with Odoo, e-commerce, and Odoo's own development frameworks. The AI & Odoo session, in particular, asks a very interesting question: how does AI perform when layered on top of ERP functions that already carry real, structured business data? This is different from the type of scenario that we may encounter with typical Indian businesses, i.e., companies fiddling with AI with no existing digital systems in place.

To conclude, yes, India will adopt AI broadly. But the businesses that extract real value from it will mostly be the ones that did the slower work first, building the digital foundation that AI actually needs to be useful. That includes tracking data worth processing, designing operations that are legible to software, and implementing systems that are scalable and well connected. An event of this scale, free to attend and built around transferable skills rather than trend forecasting, is a serious attempt to widen that base. Whether or not it gets framed that way in the coverage, that is what September 11 and 12 in Gandhinagar is actually about.