Toucan: A New Goldmine For Tool-Calling AI Agents
IBM, Friday, October 17th, 2025
The dataset of 1.5 million task scenarios, field-tested and open-sourced by IBM and University of Washington, is designed to improve how agents interact with the world and get things done.
Of all the capabilities that define an AI agent, tool-calling is perhaps the most essential. Without the ability to find and deploy 'tools,' which are basically applications on the web, a large language model is little more than a plain old chatbot.
Teaching LLMs to properly call and execute tools, however, is far from easy. They need a variety of high-quality examples to learn from, and that kind of data is hard to create, let alone find, on the internet.