Show Notes
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.
More from Building Agentic Experiences
Most product tools bolted AI onto what they already had. Arto Tolonen built ProductSense with AI as the centerpiece, then drew a hard line: the system gathers the evidence, the human still makes the call. Arto spent 10 years in product at Smartly.io, ending as chief product officer while the company scaled past 100 million in ARR. He now runs ProductSense with a team of 5 and a 1.5 million euro pre-seed led by Peak. The product ingests sales and support transcripts, customer discussions, market signals and product analytics into a knowledge graph, and every insight is one click from the raw source. Early on the analysis surfaced their own sales pitch as customer demand, which is why every prompt is now framed for product decisions. He refuses to build public voting boards, and he refuses to hand the decision to an agent. His take: in B2B, product decisions are business decisions, and you should not give those to an AI anytime soon.
The CRM is the oldest category in SaaS, and its incumbents are still deciding where to inject AI into systems built over decades. Santtu Koivumäki inherited all of their expectations and none of their code, then named the company after the number of clicks he wants left. Santtu and his co-founder left Smartly.io in 2022, after scaling it past 100 million in ARR onto a go-to-market stack of 15 tools with every team in its own silo. Thirteen months after ChatGPT launched, they flew to San Francisco with no network there and started cold DMing founders on LinkedIn. One of them said over coffee that he would build a zero click CRM, and the name stuck. Two years in, Zero's API and MCP do nearly everything the UI does, and its best fit customers come from HubSpot. His bet is that the switching cost moat falls once agents can read a legacy CRM's configuration and rebuild it elsewhere. The data migration is the easy part. 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.
Most guests build one product and bet the company on it. Joni Juup is the designer and developer who has helped a long list of SaaS companies build agentic experiences, and for one episode the show flips so the usual interviewer takes the guest chair. Joni has spent about twenty years in the field. Before ChatGPT, he was chaining language models together in a drag and drop playground and demoing it at Web Summit in 2022, roughly two months before ChatGPT launched. He also worked on machine learning solutions at Silo AI before co-founding Intentface. Now he works as an AI development partner to SaaS companies like Vainu, Agileday, and Jobilla, coming in as a catalyst to ship working proof of concepts fast. His method is stupid simple by his own description. Picture the best possible outcome first, then walk back the steps to build it. His take is to focus on the problem, not the technology. 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.
The PSA software market is full of legacy platforms bolting AI onto decade-old code. Jaakko Hartikainen built AgileDay AI-native from its 2022 founding, then raised 6.4 million euros on the bet that the models are already good enough and execution is the only thing left. Jaakko spent 20 years in consulting before founding AgileDay in 2022, designing the PSA platform to be AI-native from the data structure up. It now serves more than 70 customers across Europe and North America and runs over 10 agents inside the product, including one that reads an RFP and builds an optimal team in 60 seconds. After raising 1.3 million euros in 2023, he closed a 6.4 million euro round from international VCs and has been winning competitive evaluations against global PSA incumbents where AI was the deciding factor. He even rebuilt the company strategy in a single week, with agents running iterations overnight and the team reviewing them at 7am. His take: the technology is already here, so you stop waiting for better models and you execute. 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.
Most SaaS leaders retrofit AI into what they already have. Henri Nordström rebuilt Jobilla from scratch and stepped down as CEO to make it work.