Michael Cizmar
President, Managing Director @ MC+A
Let’s be honest: most organizations don’t wake up thinking, “Today’s the day we fix search.” But if you’re building with Agentic AI—CrewAI, Copilot, or any platform that relies on intelligent agents—search isn’t just a backend feature. It’s the context engine that makes your agents smart, proactive, and trustworthy.
With Agentic AI, search is no longer a passive tool—it’s a context engine that enables intelligent agents, actively shaping how organizations discover, connect, and act on information.
Why Agents Struggle: The Real-World Challenge
Your agent’s poor performance can be due to poor relevancy. Even with advanced agentic platforms like CrewAI and Copilot, the effectiveness of your AI agents is fundamentally limited by the quality of your search infrastructure. As highlighted in recent research (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21038), vector search—while powerful for semantic similarity—has notable limitations:
- Recall Gaps: Vector search can miss highly relevant documents that don’t fit the learned semantic patterns, especially for rare, factual, or domain-specific queries.
- Context Loss: It often ignores critical metadata (like publish dates, document types, or organizational units), which are essential for agent memory and contextual understanding.
- Explainability: The “black box” nature of vector search makes it difficult for agents to justify or audit their recommendations, which can erode trust and limit adoption.
Queries come in all sorts of forms and all tokens are equal, and you are supplying the context to your agents as fact. If you want to get your facts straight, you need to get your search fixed. At MC+A, we’re at the forefront of this transformation, modernizing search to empower AI agents and human users alike for years.
MC+A in Action: Copilot & CrewAI
Copilot Example:
Recently, we spent several days building a newsletter agent in Copilot. The agent struggled to make decisions on which articles should be selected for the newsletter. By developing a custom tool—effectively a search with custom ranking—we broke down the problem. Adding signals like likes and discussions from our internal Viva Engage group about the articles gave us real-time insight into which topics were hot and worth broadcasting to our large follower base. This experience reinforced a core lesson: agent performance is directly tied to the quality of search infrastructure. When we tuned relevancy and layered in metadata, Copilot’s recommendations became more accurate and explainable.
CrewAI & Enterprise Search:
For enterprise clients, we developed custom pipelines for natural language and vector search, built custom rescorers, and tuned models to support CrewAI’s agentic workflows. We generated recommendations for content gaps based on what users were searching, the “no result” pages, and the content that was available. The result? Agents that could recall context, synthesize information, and act on behalf of users—without missing critical details.
To OCR or Not OCR:
While you’ll hear that OCR isn’t necessary because of multimodal models, that’s generally not true in practice. Text-based indexes consistently outperform vectors on large corpora. As you rescore, refine, and answer questions based on that context, the visual form of the data becomes more important than a bunch of bounding boxes. Our experience shows that integrating OCR unlocks valuable information for agents and users alike.
Ready to Stop Sabotaging Your AI Project?
If you’re tired of watching your agentic AI projects stall because your team isn’t search experts, it’s time to call in the pros. At MC+A, we don’t just talk about search modernization—we deliver it. We’ve rescued projects that struggled with poor relevancy, broken ranking, and incomplete context. Our offerings include:
- Search Modernization Assessments: Diagnose what’s holding your agents back and map out a clear path to better results.
- Custom Relevancy & Ranking Solutions: From metadata-aware ranking to hybrid retrieval, we build the context engine your agents need.
- OCR & Document Intelligence: Unlock the value in your legacy documents and scanned files—so your agents never miss a fact.
- Agentic Platform Integration: Seamless support for CrewAI, Copilot, and more, ensuring your agents have the memory and context to deliver.
- Continuous Optimization: Monthly tuning, analytics, and feedback loops to keep your search—and your agents—at peak performance.
Stop letting search be the weak link in your AI strategy. If you’re ready to get serious about results, let MC+A help you turn your agentic platform into a true competitive advantage. Contact us.