AI in Your Corner: Real Uses for Real Life
On May 27, 2026, the Women in the Global Battery Industry (WGBI) hosted its latest webinar of the year — a practical, encouraging, and energizing session on using artificial intelligence in everyday life. Moderated by Ellen Maxey of Clarios and Chair of the WGBI Education Committee, the webinar featured guest speaker Erin Allen, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Bain and Company, whose enthusiasm for making technology accessible proved infectious from the first slide.
Meet the Speaker
Erin Allen brings a rare combination of technical depth and approachable warmth to conversations about AI. As Director of Enterprise Architecture at Bain and Company, she focuses on technology strategy, AI enablement, and connecting complex systems to real business outcomes. She developed her AI fluency through hands-on experimentation and self-directed learning, and is a vocal advocate for women in technology through organizations including SIM Wisconsin, WIT Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Technology Association. With a background that also includes nearly a decade at Sargento and a personal passion for the automotive industry, Allen speaks to technical and non-technical audiences alike with equal ease.
A Personal Focus — By Design
Maxey opened the session with an important framing note: today’s content would focus entirely on personal, not professional, use of AI. Because most organizations have their own policies and platforms for workplace AI, the session deliberately steered clear of that territory. “We do not want to go against that or give you conflicting information,” Maxey noted, encouraging attendees to consult their IT teams for guidance on workplace use. Allen reinforced this throughout, reminding the group to keep work and personal AI use clearly separated.
What Is AI — Really?
Allen offered a grounding primer for attendees at every level of familiarity. AI, she reminded the group, is not new — spam filters, GPS navigation, Netflix recommendations, and credit card fraud alerts have all been powered by it for years. What changed in 2022 was the arrival of generative AI: tools designed for open-ended, creative, non-deterministic tasks like writing, brainstorming, and conversation. To make the concept stick, she reached for a memorable analogy: “When you work with generative AI, think of it really as an intern. It’s really well read, but it may sometimes seem like it’s overconfident and could give you the wrong answers.” The implication was clear: treat it as a capable collaborator, not an oracle.
Navigating the Major Platforms
Allen surveyed the AI landscape with the clarity of someone who has actually used these tools extensively. ChatGPT she called the “all-around workhorse” — strong across writing, planning, and image generation, though prone to confident errors that demand verification. Claude, from Anthropic, stands out for writing quality and analyzing long documents, with the added benefit that “it does a pretty good job of showing you its reasoning.” Gemini is woven into the Google ecosystem; Perplexity excels at surfacing well-cited information for research; Microsoft Copilot is the enterprise standard; and Grok, built on the X platform, is fast, conversational, and socially aware. Her personal approach: “I’ve kind of gravitated myself towards ChatGPT and Claude. I bounce back and forth between those two based on what I’m working on.”
Real Life Use Cases
The session’s richest section was a tour through six categories of practical AI use: travel, health, finances, learning, family life, and personal presence. Travel planning was a crowd favorite, with Allen sharing how she used AI to help pack for a trip to Amsterdam. For health, she highlighted prompts like “explain my A1C results in plain English” as a way to decode confusing lab results and prepare better questions for doctors. On finances, she walked through using AI to understand legal contract language and draft negotiation letters. And for family life, she offered a vivid personal example: when her mother-in-law’s mobility scooter wouldn’t start in spring, she used ChatGPT and a photo to troubleshoot the problem. “It identified what model it was, knew exactly where to check for the fuses, and gave me some really helpful tips” — no manual required.
Attendees added their own examples throughout: vegetable gardens, meal planning from fridge contents, bedtime stories customized for their children, softening a frustrated email, and reasoning through investment decisions for an endowment. The chat reinforced what Allen had observed at the start — many attendees were already experimenting, and the room was eager for more.
The Key: Context, Conversation, and Pushing Back
If there was a single throughline in Allen’s advice, it was this: stop using AI like a search engine and start using it like a thought partner. Providing rich context produces dramatically better results. Susan Bernard, WGBI’s Executive Director, illustrated this in real time, sharing that she had first built a detailed spreadsheet before asking AI to create a budget — and got excellent results. Allen translated the principle simply: “Providing that context, that information means you’re going to get a better result.” She also encouraged attendees to push back when a first response falls short, to ask follow-up questions, and to request that AI cite its sources and explain its reasoning. A pointed question she recommends: “What information might change your answer?” — a useful way to surface the limits of any AI response.
Privacy, Accuracy, and Staying in Control
Allen closed with a candid look at what to watch out for. Her privacy rule was both practical and memorable: “If you wouldn’t say it out loud in a coffee shop, don’t put it in AI.” Full names, account numbers, medical specifics, and employer confidential information all stay out. On accuracy, she was equally direct: AI can be confidently wrong, and the user is always the final check. She underscored the point with a cautionary image — a couple who drove into Lake Michigan because their GPS said to. “Common sense, your critical thinking always need to prevail here. You are the editor. You are the expert. You are the person in control.”
A Challenge to Take Home
Allen closed with an invitation rather than an instruction: pick one use case from the session, try it, and share what you learn. “That’s how we learn. We learn from each other, we learn through experimenting.” Maxey added her own challenge: as WGBI plans a year-end interactive session for members to share their 2026 AI experiences, she encouraged everyone to start keeping a list of their positive AI moments now. She also suggested that AI could help members find articles for WGBI’s energizing conversations throughout the year — a small but concrete example of the very thing the webinar set out to demonstrate.
WGBI members are encouraged to renew their 2026 membership and to watch for upcoming details on the next webinar, Keeping Good People — a panel discussion moderated by Ellen Maxey at the recent WGBI convention, coming soon to the full membership.