It’s a fair question. "Vibe Coding" is a term where people use AI to build functional apps just by describing the "vibe" of what they need. No complex code, just a conversation with a prompt.

If any team member can now create a custom tool into existence to solve their specific problem, does the traditional, structured ERP still have a seat at the table?

We’ve been watching this closely (and experimenting ourselves). But despite all the wonders, we think that for some businesses, an ERP is still the right move. Here’s why.

The "Island Problem" (aka the Spreadsheet Multiplier)

The temptation today is to build the "perfect" niche tool for every tiny task. But as a recent article from the Help to Grow Alumni network points out, most businesses don't suffer from a lack of tools; they suffer from fragmentation.

Ian Wylie notes in the piece that tech stacks often grow "accidentally rather than strategically". When everyone starts Vibe Coding their own mini-solutions, that accidental growth goes into overdrive. You end up with a business made of "digital islands" - brilliant little tools that simply cannot talk to each other.

We’ve seen it first-hand: even before AI, businesses were already building "islands" using Excel. We bet you’ve seen this in your own office: three different departments - or even three different people in the same department - all using their own slightly different version of the exact same spreadsheet to do the same task.

Vibe coding doesn't solve this problem if your staff don't communicate - and worse, it's no longer only an Excel spreadsheet.

Why "Syncing" isn't a Magic Wand

You might think, "It’s okay, we’ll just sync data" or maybe even "read directly from <that-other-software>". In reality, syncing is often much harder than people think. It’s rarely as simple as "plugging A into B", and whilst LLMs / AI certainly make this a lot easier it's still a minefield.

Different systems have different "ideas" about your data. When these islands try to talk, the bridges often break if you don't think about them very carefully. Data gets out of date, records get duplicated or overwritten with competing edits at each end, and suddenly, nobody knows which screen is actually telling the truth.

The "Perfect Software" Trap

There is a common misconception that "perfect software" is the one that has every custom feature you ever dreamed of. But in reality, the "perfect" software for a business is the one that connects your people and does enough. It's rare in life that you can please everyone.

Dr. Alex Kevill highlights in the Help to Grow piece that fragmented tools actually hurt collaboration. They cause "frustration, reduced confidence, and resistance." If your sales team is using a "perfectly vibed" CRM that doesn't see what’s happening in the "perfectly vibed" customer support app, your human teams will eventually stop talking, too.

The Power Couple: When AI meets your ERP

Here’s the secret: we don’t think AI is a replacement for an ERP. In fact, AI is the ultimate teammate for your ERP. When you have all your data in one place (like Odoo), AI stops being a toy and starts being a superpower. Instead of building a new app from scratch, you can use AI to do some seriously clever things with the data you already have:

• Chatting to your ERP: Imagine asking your system, "Who are my top 10 customers in the UK who haven't ordered in three months?" and getting an answer in seconds, rather than building a manual report.
• Sentiment Analysis: AI can scan your incoming customer emails or support tickets and flag the ones where the "vibe" is a bit frustrated, so your team can jump in and help before it becomes a problem.
• Smart Forecasting: Let AI look at three years of clean sales data in your ERP to predict exactly how many widgets you’ll need to order for next Tuesday.

Without an ERP, AI can just be a brain with no memory. With an ERP, it has the full context of your entire business.

You can’t Vibe Code a Foundation

At Glo, we’re clear on one thing: we don't implement your ERP with vibes. Implementing Odoo is about building a rock-solid, professional foundation. It’s the "boring" but vital stuff: clean data, integrated accounting, and a single source of truth.

As Nil Chohan of Instinct Hardware says in the Help to Grow article, you have to "strip right back to the basics" to ensure a system works, and ERPs can still help with that.

The Verdict: A Change is Coming, but Foundations are Forever

We are undoubtedly standing at the tip of a significant shift. AI / LLMs are incredibly powerful, and they are changing how we interact with the world.

What we don't know yet is the scale of that change. Is this a monumental shift on the level of industrialisation and farming mechanisation, where the entire nature of work is rewritten? Or is it more akin to the move from punch cards to writing software - a massive leap in efficiency and accessibility, but one that still requires the same underlying logic and structure?

The truth is, nobody knows for sure yet. But in either scenario, having a consolidated system like Odoo means:

• Your data is ready for whatever comes next: Whether AI is a tool or a total takeover, it needs clean data to be useful.
• You kill the "Spreadsheet Multiplier": Everyone looks at the same data, in real-time.
• You scale safely: You aren't relying on a patchwork of experiments; you're relying on a professional infrastructure that can adapt.

Every business is different. But if you’re finding that your "perfect" tools are actually making your life more complicated, an ERP might be the right move to bring everything back into harmony.

Are you currently drowning in "Master Spreadsheets" and disconnected apps? Want to know how AI can work for you? We’d love to help you figure out if consolidation is the right path for you. Let's have a friendly chat about building a foundation that’s ready for the future - no matter what the "vibe" turns out to be.