Ep. 0855:22
Taito.ai Threw Away a Year of Work to Go Agent-Native
with Juho Eräste — Co-founder & CTO, Taito.ai
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Listen on Apple PodcastsWhat does it take to go agent-native? For Taito.ai, it meant throwing away a year of work.
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.