Concurrent sessions are the meat and potatoes of professional conferences. Use AI to improve the recipe.
Evaluating, scoring, and slotting sessions can be a monumental task for staff and volunteer peer reviewers. Here’s where AI can really help, by streamlining these processes and more importantly, raising the quality bar.
To get the maximum benefit from incorporating AI into the session selection process, you’ll want to train your AI Large Language Model (LLM), much like you would train conference committee members or session submission reviewers. You should leverage AI to complement the work of volunteer subject matter experts, not replace them. Smart people with influence are a much greater competitive advantage than just relying on AI alone. Here are three practical use cases:

1. Initial Submission Ranking

Similar to resume screening, AI can help identify the strong and weak submissions. Eliminate the bottom 20 or 25 percent from the peer-review process.
Benefit – Peer reviewers can focus their time and effort on the sessions that are most likely to be part of the final program.
Training Input – Provide your AI solution with the scoring rubric used to evaluate session submissions. We trained our solution to score based on relevancy (50 percent), originality (30 percent), and ability to inspire action (20 percent) — and included definitions for grading to increase accuracy.

2. Elevating Session Titles, Descriptions and Learning Objectives

Ask AI to score each session on these attributes individually. Only work on editing the ones that score low and need it most. Be careful with this one as it can ruffle the feathers of your speakers.
Benefit – Your conference program and marketing communications will be upgraded with improved consistency.
Training Input –We trained our solution to make sure that titles, session descriptions, and learning objectives followed best practices (as shared in this Convene article: tinyurl.com/2y8s3m29). We went a step further by providing Bloom’s Taxonomy (tinyurl.com/yc62eu5k) with the instruction to use verbs that fall into the Application or Analysis levels.

3. Smart Slotting and Personalized Agendas

Two common challenges that prevent attendees from getting the most out of their learning experience are 1) competing session content over the same time slot or 2) no sessions that align with their priorities. AI can help identify potential scheduling conflicts or holes on the front end. To enable personalized agendas, ask attendees during the registration process to select their top two or three priorities from a pick list.
Benefit – Intelligent recommendations are the holy grail for improving the attendee experience. To set the stage for that outcome, leverage AI during the review and slotting process stages to reduce or eliminate conflicts during a concurrent session time slot.
Training Input – We scraped and uploaded the concurrent sessions’ day, time, track, title, description, and learning objectives from a recent major industry conference. Next, we created four of our own learning pathways: 1) increasing event attendance, 2) improving education and experience, 3) growing non-dues revenue, and 4) managing event costs. We added keywords and phrases to further define the learning pathways.
Before you consider making a leap into incorporating AI into the session management process, it is highly recommended that you prove the model using real-life test data. Feed last year’s program into your AI tool using the prompt insights above and compare the results.

Choose Your Solution Wisely

The use cases explored in this article can be completed by nearly any AI solution, free or paid. When it comes to content submissions, however, it is strongly recommended that you select a solution that enables you to own/control the data, proprietary prompts, and outputs, as well as protect your members’/submitters’ IP. Moreover, you want to use a tool that progressively gets better the more it’s used.
More than likely that means you want a paid — and possibly an enterprise/team — subscription.
Adapted from Dave’s Forward Thinking column in PCMA’s Convene. Reprinted with permission of Convene, the magazine of the Professional Convention Management Association. ©2025.