I do a lot of data cleaning as part of my job, and I've found that small models could be very useful for that, particularly in the face of somewhat messy data.

You can for instance use them to extract some information such as postal codes from strings, or to translate and standardize country names written in various languages (e.g. Spanish, Italian and French to English), etc.

I'm sure people will have more advanced use cases, but I've found them useful for that.