Pre-score submissions with Screener

Screener is the agent that reads session submissions and scores them against your review plan’s scorecard, the same way a human reviewer would. Humans review; Screener screens. It works through a set of personas — AI reviewers with a name, a background and a review style — so a submission gets more than one point of view. The scores land next to your human reviewers’ scores on the plan, and people still make every decision.

Screener was called the Reviewer agent until October 2026. The training video below still uses that name and shows the earlier labels; the steps are the same.

Training video · 3:50Reviewer agent: pre-score submissions on your evaluation planWhat the Reviewer agent does, switching it on from the Agents page, its personas (the Active Personas panel, the Persona Library, Create New), enrolling personas on an evaluation plan round from Evaluators → Personas (Add personas, Edit assignments, Run personas, Progress), where its scores land (the persona's per-submission scores, View feedback, the session's Reviews tab and the Reviewer agent results card), and how the committee reads persona scores beside human evaluators on the plan's Review tab and keeps every decision.

Video transcript

Your committee reads every submission. The Reviewer reads them first. It’s one of the agents on your Agents page, and its job is to score session submissions against your evaluation plan’s scorecard, the same rating scales and comment fields your evaluators see, so the people deciding start with a considered opinion instead of a blank form. It works through personas, AI evaluators with a name, a background and a review style. And it never changes a status. Accepting or declining stays with your committee.

Turning it on is this switch on the Reviewer card. Off becomes On, and Active agents at the top counts it. Nothing happens yet, though. The Reviewer only scores what you assign to it on a plan round, so switching it on is the quiet part. Click the card and you get its panel.

Personas are the Reviewer’s settings. Active Personas is the panel, up to three personas available to review sessions in this event, and the strip shows how many slots are used. Below it, the Persona Library. Default Personas ship with Sessionboard; Custom Personas are yours. Create New is where you write one, a name and title, a biography, a review style, and up to six questions it answers about every session. Open a persona from the library and Add to Event puts it on the panel. The Activity tab is the run log.

The scoring happens inside your evaluation plan. On the plan, Evaluators, and then the Personas sub-tab. Persona Evaluators lists every persona enrolled on this round, with its status, the round and how far through its assignments it is. Add personas enrolls them; they answer this round’s scorecard and roll up alongside your human reviewers. Each persona’s menu has Edit assignments, where you choose the submissions it reads. Then Run personas. Each one works in the background, the row shows Running while it does, and Progress fills in as reviews complete.

Expand a persona and there’s every submission it reviewed, with its score and a Completed badge. View feedback opens the submission’s Reviews tab. Here the plan and round show the persona’s answers next to the human evaluators’, and the Reviewer agent results card holds its overall opinion and overall ranking from the latest run, the persona’s reasoning in a few sentences.

So what do you do with it. The plan’s Review tab is where the committee compares submissions by average score. Open one and the Ratings section lists every evaluator, your people and the personas, each marked as an AI persona evaluator with its own overall. A persona’s score is advice, weighted like any other evaluator’s on the round. Disagree, and you can let the committee’s own scores carry the decision, or Remove from round drops its scores from the average. The decision itself, accept, decline, waitlist, is made on the session, by a person.

Back on the Agents page, the Reviewer card keeps its counts, and the Activity tab on its panel is the run log, one line per session reviewed with the personas’ average ranking and the date, newest first. The Help Center article on the Reviewer agent has the detail, and the Review and evaluation chapter covers the plan itself, rounds, scorecards and evaluators. Next, the Coordinator, the agent that keeps your speakers on track.

What Screener does

Reads each submission assigned to it on a review plan round and answers the round’s scorecard — the same rating scales and comment fields your reviewers see.
Reviews as each persona on the round, so one submission can carry a cautious reading and an enthusiastic one side by side.
Writes an overall opinion and an overall ranking for each session it screens, which you can open from the session’s Reviews tab.
Keeps a run log, so you can see which sessions it has looked at and when.

It never changes a submission’s status. Accepting or declining stays with your committee.

Turn Screener on

Open Agents in the event sidebar.
On the Screener card, switch the toggle on. The card’s chip changes from Off to On, and Active Agents at the top of the page counts it.
Click the card to open its panel. The Personas tab is where you choose who screens; the Activity tab lists what it has done.

Screener only scores what you assign to it on a plan round, so turning it on changes nothing until you add personas to a round and run them.

Personas

Personas are Screener’s settings: they decide who does the screening and how. Each one has an identity (name, title, biography), a review style (tone, what it likes, what it dislikes) and up to six custom questions it answers about every session.

Active Personas — the panel of up to three personas available to screen sessions in this event. The strip under the heading shows how many of the three slots are used.
Persona Library — every persona you can use. Default Personas ship with Sessionboard. Custom Personas are yours; create one with Create New, and edit it later from the pencil icon.
To put a persona on the panel, open it from the library and click Add to Event. When all three slots are used, the button reads Panel Full until you remove one with Remove from panel.

Add personas to a plan round

Screener scores inside your review plans. On a plan:

Open the plan and go to the Reviewers tab, then the Personas sub-tab. The Persona Reviewers table lists every persona enrolled on the round.
Click Add personas and pick the personas for this round. They answer the round’s scorecard and roll up alongside your human reviewers.
In a persona’s ⋯ menu, choose Edit assignments to pick which submissions it screens. A persona with no assignments has nothing to score.
Click Run personas. Each persona screens its assigned submissions in the background; the row shows Running while it works and the Progress column fills in as reviews complete.

To take a persona off the round, use Remove from round in the same menu. Its finished reviews stay on the submissions it already scored.

You can also run Screener on submissions you pick: select sessions on Program → Submissions → Sessions and choose Run Screener in the bulk actions bar.

What Screener produces

On the plan — expand a persona’s row in Persona Reviewers to see each assigned submission with its score and a Completed badge. View feedback opens the submission’s Reviews tab.
On the submission — the Reviews tab lists the plan and round with the persona’s answers (labelled Screener persona) next to the human reviewers’ answers, and a Screener results card with each persona’s overall opinion and overall ranking from its latest run.
On the Agents page — the Screener card shows how many sessions it has screened and the average score it gave, and Awaiting your review at the top counts anything an agent has queued for you.

Review and override

Persona scores are advice, weighted like any other reviewer’s on the round. To act on them:

Open the plan’s Scores tab to compare submissions by average score, then open a submission to read each reviewer’s answers — personas and people together.
Disagree with a persona? Leave its review where it is and let the committee’s own scores carry the decision, or Remove from round to drop its scores from the round’s average.
The decision itself — accept, decline, waitlist — is made on the session, by a person. Screener never changes a status.

Summarize the previous round’s comments

On a review plan with several rounds, Screener can also summarize the comments reviewers shared from the previous round, for the team leads of the next one. Turn it on per round with Summarize previous round’s reviewer feedback with the Reviewer agent (the setting still uses the agent’s earlier name); it is off by default, and an admin approves each summary before anyone else sees it unless you change that. The summary never scores or decides anything. See Summarize the previous round with Screener.

Run history

The Activity tab on Screener’s panel is the run log: one line per session screened, with the average of the personas’ overall rankings and the date, newest first. View all runs expands it. The Screener results card on a session shows that session’s runs, newest first, with each persona’s answers from each run.