Filed under model-deployment.

When the Model Works and the Line Does Not

Seventy-seven per cent of AI vision pilots in manufacturing never reach full deployment — not because the detection accuracy is wrong, but because the factory floor is. This essay traces six failure modes: environments the training set never saw, integrations that ran eight times over budget, thresholds nobody will own in writing, and models that drift when procurement switches supplier. The automation thesis survives the pilot. The line does not.