---
type: podcast-episode
slug: 08-juho-eraste-taito-ai
number: 8
title: Taito.ai Threw Away a Year of Work to Go Agent-Native
guestName: Juho Eräste
guestTitle: Co-founder & CTO
guestLinkedin: 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/ikonenjuho/'
guestCompany: Taito.ai
guestCompanyUrl: 'https://taito.ai/'
guestBio: >
  Juho Eräste is co-founder and CTO of Taito.ai, a Helsinki-based people
  operations platform backed by Accel. Before Taito, he saw Smartly grow from 10
  to 1,000 people. In late 2025 he led Taito's rebuild from scratch into an
  agent-native product that you can run from Slack or from Claude over MCP.
hosts:
  - slug: joni-juup
  - slug: tapio-haaja
summary: >-
  Juho Eräste, CTO of Taito.ai, on throwing away a year of work to rebuild their
  HR platform agent-native, switching to Claude, and why agents should control
  every part of a product.
hook: >-
  What does it take to go agent-native? For Taito.ai, it meant throwing away a
  year of work.
youtubeId: wiRWGfdqnfc
spotifyUrl: >-
  https://open.spotify.com/episode/7pFNbBk8KJsJBGDcwVhzyh?si=awXwrFrsRESZ1iTfaoeoVQ
appleUrl: >-
  https://podcasts.apple.com/fi/podcast/building-agentic-experiences/id1886740996?i=1000793122317
duration: '55:22'
publishedAt: '2026-10-05'
updatedAt: '2026-10-05'
chapters:
  - time: '00:00'
    label: Taito AI Overview
  - time: '04:50'
    label: HRIS Pivot
  - time: '10:54'
    label: Agent-Native Rewrite
  - time: '20:26'
    label: Technical Foundations
  - time: '26:10'
    label: Trust and Testing
  - time: '33:07'
    label: Agent Hallucinations
  - time: '38:21'
    label: Performance Reviews
  - time: '43:39'
    label: Future of AI
---

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.