TL;DR: The CFO's job is moving from recording the past to steering the future. Odoo is good at the first, not yet at the second. That gap is where Odoo partners need to become architects.
I read it on a plane to Indonesia, on my way to visit our Jakarta office.
The piece was from Lumera, called "The New CFO Needs an Operating System" (credit to Sowmya Ranganathan, it's the reason this issue exists).
The story in it is impressive. She gave an AI coding agent her month-end close checklist, went away for a few hours, and came back to ten small finance apps already deployed.
But that's not what caught me.
What caught me was that the article looks at the CFO's role. What they're responsible for, and how that's changing. Most AI pieces I read start from the tool and look for a problem. This one starts from the person.
The job is moving
A CFO runs two jobs. Accounting records what happened: close the month, reconcile, make sure the numbers are right and the auditor is happy. Finance looks ahead: forecasts, cash, decisions.
That job doesn't disappear. But AI is eating the repetitive part of it, fast. Matching, chasing, preparing the monthly pack: these are exactly the tasks people are now automating in an afternoon.
So what's left for the CFO? Steering. Where's the cash going to be in three months? What happens if we open that market, or lose that customer? Which bet do we make?
Recording the past is becoming the easy part. Steering the future is the job.
The honest twist
Here's where I have to be honest about our own product.
For most of our clients, the core is Odoo. And Odoo is very good at the recording part. Accounting, inventory, purchase, sales, HR and payroll share one database, so the past is recorded once, in one place. That's not nothing. I've seen numbers not match across files all the time, and not only in small factories (it happens with large corporate clients too).
But financial planning and cash management are still weak.
Odoo is good to record the past but not yet the future.
So if a CFO asks me "can Odoo be my operating system for the next ten years?", my honest answer is: it's a great foundation for the half of the job that's getting easier. For the half that's getting more important, it's not there yet.
(I am not saying this to make Odoo look bad. We sell it. I'd just rather say it here than have a CFO discover it during the project.)
Where AI fits
The article's answer is: build your own tools, and get the controls right. Who can log in, who sees what, who changed what. That part I fully agree with.
But at Portcities, we are not building finance agents. That’s not our game.
Our focus is the architecture: making sure the right data is in the right place, clean, and accessible to AI. Once that's done, our clients can use the AI tools they like, or build their own automations (call them "agents" if you want) to look forward: forecasts, scenarios, cash projections.
Without that, AI just reads a mess faster. With it, the CFO can finally ask questions about the future and trust the answer, because it's built on the past that Odoo recorded properly.
What this means for us, the partners
This is the part I really care about.
Over the last years, the product matured and the partner job became mostly configuration. AI is now very good at configuration. If your value is "I know which checkbox to tick", I have bad news for you.
AI doesn't kill the partner. It kills the configurator.
What a CFO needs now is an architect: someone who decides what lives in Odoo, what lives outside, how the data flows, and how AI gets access to it without breaking the controls. And it's tied to a result the CFO cares about, not to hours. Clients don't buy your hourly rate anyway. They buy the price of the solution, and whether the project succeeds.
I have to be humble here. We are not there yet. A lot of our team was trained as excellent configurators, because that's what the market asked for. Becoming architects is not a training course; it's a different job.
What I'm doing right now is simple (not easy): sharing the strategy and the vision with our management team, so they can prioritise the right changes. Organising training. Changing how we run projects.
This is the start. Ask me again in a year.
So what?
The CFO is moving from recording the past to steering the future. Odoo handles the first well and the second not yet. The partner who makes the right data accessible to AI is the one who closes that gap.
I'm curious: if you're an Odoo partner, are your clients' CFOs already asking you about the future, or still only about the close?
Best,
Gaspard