The first question is always whether it can be done with a handful of examples. For image recognition and forecasting: it cannot. Count on hundreds of examples per category, and that applies just as much to the category you are actually trying to catch. Twenty photos of a defect is too few to teach a model what a defect is, however good the rest of your data may be.
Beyond that you need someone who can say what is right and what is wrong. A model learns from that judgement, so if two colleagues disagree about the same photo, that is a problem to settle before training rather than during it. That costs time on your side, and it goes into the quote up front instead of halfway through.
With an optimisation model it is the other way round. That one learns from rules rather than examples, so the question is not how much data you have but whether someone can write down what a good plan has to satisfy. That sounds easier and usually is not: half of those rules live in the head of whoever does it now, and only come out once the model proposes something that plainly cannot be done.
And this is research, not a build. With a website I know in advance that it will exist and the only question is how. Here, “this cannot be made good enough” is a valid outcome that you agree to up front. That is why the scan exists, why the image work is a trial project, and why you will hear a range from me and never a percentage before I have seen your data.