When we reach for it
Inspection, document capture and counting — where the work is repetitive, high-volume and visually consistent. The projects that succeed are the ones where somebody can say precisely what a correct answer looks like, and has enough labelled examples to prove it.
When we would argue against it
Domains where the failure mode is expensive and the images are inconsistent. The pilot demo and the production accuracy are very different numbers. Capture conditions defeat more of this work than model architecture does. If the lighting, angle and image quality are not controlled, that is the project, and we will say so before the modelling starts.
What it looks like in delivery
Labelled data budgeted as a real line item, and accuracy reported against a held-out set from the actual capture conditions. The first question we ask is what happens when the system is unsure. In anything clinical or safety-related the answer is that a person decides, and the model’s job is to order the queue rather than to close it.