IBM CUGA + Tavily: Bringing Reliable Web Search to Enterprise Agents

IBM Software Innovations Lab developed CUGA, an open-source Configurable Generalist Agent harness that provides orchestration, tool calling, state management, and self-correction while allowing teams to customize tools, prompts, and domain knowledge for enterprise applications. After leading benchmarks such as AppWorld and WebArena, CUGA was adapted for workloads requiring current web information, where earlier approaches relied on page scraping with Playwright and DOM processing. The team integrated Tavily as a web-search tool directly within CUGA’s agent loop and through a shared MCP server on IBM Code Engine, enabling multiple applications to access search without exposing individual API keys. Tavily’s readable page content, relevance scores, tool-compatible response format, and server-side key management reduced maintenance and improved the reliability of search results used by agent planners. This architecture also supports regulated, sovereign, and air-gapped deployment requirements by making web access a configurable policy-controlled option rather than a code-level exception, while tools such as Web Researcher use multiple searches and source citations for each claim.

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