What is an agent?
A virtual employee that works without you: mission, trigger, rules and reporting. How to talk to one, and how to install it inside your Odoo.
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With Aidoo AI, you ask a question and the assistant answers. An agent works without you: it wakes on a schedule, reacts to an event in Odoo, or simply waits for someone to talk to it. It carries out its mission, then reports back.
That is the difference between a tool you open and a colleague you hand a recurring task to.
Where to find agents
Agents live in the Agents space of the dashboard: switch with the selector at the top of the sidebar. In the AI space, the menu entry is not shown.
The five parts of an agent
A mission
What the agent must do, written in plain language. "Every morning, list validated customer invoices that are unpaid and past due. For each one, add a chatter note summarising the delay and schedule a follow-up activity for the salesperson in charge."
An AI model
Picked from a short list, selected on a single criterion: reliably chaining tool calls over several turns. A cheaper model is enough for a simple task; careful analysis deserves a more capable one.
A trigger
A schedule ("every Monday at 8 a.m.") or an Odoo event ("as soon as a quotation becomes an order"). That is what separates an agent from a workflow you launch by hand. A conversational agent has no trigger at all: it answers when someone addresses it.
Rules
The precise list of what the agent may touch: which models, which operations, under which value conditions. These rules are checked by the server on every call, not by the AI.
A reporting channel
Where the result lands: the activity feed in Aidoo, an email, the Odoo chatter, a Discuss channel. An agent that works without reporting back is useless.
What an agent cannot do
Three hard limits, not configurable
Whatever its settings, an agent can never delete a record, edit a model's hints, or request a file upload. These are not options turned off by default: the operations do not exist in its rule engine.
Deletion is excluded because it is irreversible and no human reviews the agent before it acts. Hints are excluded because an agent rewriting its own instructions would eventually drift. Attachments assume someone to receive a link and drop a file: with nobody there, the tool makes no sense.
An agent can however search, read, create, update, trigger a business action, produce aggregates and generate PDFs, within the limits you set.
The agent acts under a real Odoo identity
An agent has no account of its own. It borrows the Odoo identity of a team member, designated at creation.
In practice: in the Odoo history, its actions appear under that account. Any existing Odoo licence will do, a salesperson's, an accountant's, a manager's: there is no user to create for the agent, and no extra licence to budget for. The account you designate does set its scope, though: it is the first setting to choose carefully.
Odoo rights always win
An agent can never exceed the rights of the Odoo account it borrows. That is your last safety net: even an over-broad Aidoo rule stays bounded by Odoo.
The agent stores no token. It references the member, and that member's Odoo key is resolved at execution time. Change it and the agent follows; remove it and the agent pauses instead of failing in a loop.
Schedule, event, or conversation
A schedule suits periodic tasks: a morning briefing, a weekly recap, a monthly check. The agent wakes, does its work, goes back to sleep.
An event suits reactions: a new lead to qualify, a ticket to triage, an order to check. Aidoo watches an Odoo model and fires the agent when a record is created or updated according to your conditions.
A conversation suits what has no timetable. A conversational agent has no trigger: it waits to be addressed. This is the mode to pick for a business assistant your team queries when they need it, rather than an automation running on its own.
Watching does not replay the past
On first start, an event-driven agent anchors itself to the present moment. It will not process records created before it was activated. To catch up on history, run it manually with the matching instruction.
Talking to an agent
Every agent has a discussion thread, not just the conversational ones. Open an agent in Aidoo: the same thread mixes your exchanges with it and the reports of its autonomous runs. You see what it did overnight, you ask why, it answers.
A conversation borrows exactly the same Odoo identity, the same rules and the same permissions as a scheduled run. An agent barred from writing on account.move gains nothing by being asked out loud. Exchanges consume credits, just like runs.
The agent right inside your Odoo
Your teams do not need to open Aidoo to talk to an agent. Aidoo installs into your Odoo as a bubble, in the bottom-right corner of every screen.
Everything is set from the API keys page of the dashboard, with two independent switches.
Installing the bubble adds Aidoo to your production Odoo. Each Odoo user sees the agents assigned to them, and nothing else: assignment is set agent by agent, by designating Odoo accounts. An agent with no assigned account shows up in no bubble at all.
Enabling the "Aidoo AI" chat adds, inside the same bubble, a conversational assistant that queries your database. It is the third way to connect Aidoo's AI, alongside the Claude and ChatGPT connectors: nothing to install on the user's side, no subscription to an external assistant, exchanges are drawn from your Aidoo credits.
That chat obeys the same permissions as an MCP key, enforced server-side on every call, with a deliberately reduced set: no deletion, no attachment, no hint editing, no PDF printing. On activation, only the read permissions are ticked; writes remain yours to grant.
The bubble shows two tabs: Agents for the agents assigned to you, Chat for the assistant. It knows which record is open and attaches it to the conversation, sparing you the context description. The credit counter stays visible, and "Open in Aidoo" switches to the dashboard.
One thread, two places
A conversation with an agent is the same in the Odoo bubble and in the Aidoo dashboard: it is tied to your Odoo account. Start in Odoo, carry on in Aidoo.
The eight ready-made templates
The gallery covers the most frequent uses, with permissions already trimmed to the minimum:
| Area | Agent |
|---|---|
| Finance | Unpaid invoice follow-up |
| Finance | Cash position summary |
| CRM | Inbound lead qualification |
| CRM | Waking up dormant quotations |
| Inventory | Stockout alert |
| Inventory | Late receipts |
| Support | Inbound ticket triage |
| Support | Daily summary |
Starting from a template is the shortest path: you adjust the mission and the schedule, the rules are already framed.
What agents change in practice
An agent does not replace an Odoo automation. A rule like "if the amount exceeds X then alert" is best coded in Odoo, with no AI and no per-run cost.
Agents become interesting when the task requires judgement: writing a follow-up adapted to the customer's context, deciding whether a lead is worth qualifying, spotting what looks out of place in a list. These are tasks nobody knows how to express as a rule, but a human handles in seconds.
Next step
- Creating an agent: the four paths, from template to guided creation
- Rules and permissions: bounding precisely what it may touch
- Credits and consumption: what an agent costs