Most SaaS teams add an agent to the product they already have. Juho Eräste and his co-founders threw away more than a year of work and rebuilt Taito.ai from scratch so the agent runs everything.

Juho watched Smartly grow from 10 to 1,000 people before co-founding Taito as a performance management tool. After roughly 18 months, long sales cycles pushed the team toward building a full HRIS. In late 2025 he spent about a month prototyping against three gates: historical data queries, a real-time UI everywhere, and field-level permissions for humans and agents alike.

The team went all in on agentic coding, moved from OpenAI to Claude, and built a layer that can route to any model. Today you can sign up, connect Claude over MCP, and never open Taito's web UI again. His take: the agent should be able to control every part of the tool, settings included.

About podcast:
Building Agentic Experiences is the podcast for founders and product leaders navigating the shift from AI features to autonomous agents. Hosted by Tapio Haaja (CCO) and Joni Juup (CDO) of Intentface. New episodes monthly.

Where to find Juho Eräste:
· Juho Eräste: LinkedIn: ikonenjuho
· Taito.ai website: https://taito.ai/

Where to find Tapio & Joni:
· Tapio Haaja: LinkedIn: tapiohaaja
· Joni Juup: LinkedIn: jonim
· Intentface website: https://www.intentface.com/

In this episode, we cover:
00:00 Taito AI Overview
04:50 HRIS Pivot
10:54 Agent-Native Rewrite
20:26 Technical Foundations
26:10 Trust and Testing
33:07 Agent Hallucinations
38:21 Performance Reviews
43:39 Future of AI