When we reach for it
Work that is currently manual, tolerant of review, and expensive in people’s time. Extraction and classification pay back fastest. The shape that pays back is a task done by hand today, at volume, with a person still checking the output. An agent given real tools needs the same discipline: scoped credentials, a boundary it cannot write outside of, and a record of what it did.
When we would argue against it
Decisions that must be deterministic, auditable, or right every time without a human in the loop. In regulated workflows that is most of them, and we will say so. A prompt asking a model to be careful is not a control, and we will not present one as though it were.
What it looks like in delivery
An evaluation set in the pipeline, prompts versioned like code, cost and latency budgets per call, and a defined behaviour for when the model is wrong. Cost and latency are instrumented per call from the first week, because both scale with adoption and neither is visible until the invoice arrives.