Building the session guide

The session guide is the agenda participants move through. It’s made of sections, and each section holds one or more activities. You build it on the session’s Agenda page.

Three ways to start

A new session opens on an empty agenda with three choices:

• Generate a guide with AI. Describe the session in a short brief and get a complete draft to refine. This is the recommended path and usually takes one to three minutes.
• Import an agenda. Copy the guide from a previous session, from your company library, or from the Converge global library.
• Build it yourself. Add sections and activities one at a time.

You can mix them. Generate a draft, then hand-edit; or import a template and add a section with AI.

Generating a guide with AI

Click AI Guide on the agenda. The AI Guide Builder asks for a brief:

• Research Goals. What the session is about: goals, audience, and context. This is the part that matters most.
• Source Material. Optional. Up to three files, PDF, Word, or Markdown, 20 MB each. Choose Use as inspiration to let the AI draw on them, or Reproduce as-is to turn an existing discussion guide into a Converge session. If a document has images that matter, upload it as PDF rather than Word.
• Duration (min), Participants, and Type (Consumers, Employees, Executives, Subject Matter Experts, or Mixed Participants). These shape how many activities you get and how they’re worded.

Click Generate Session Guide. The result appears as a readable guide with a Refine chat on the left. Ask for changes in plain language: “make the opening warmer”, “add a ranking of the five themes”, “cut this to forty minutes”. Each change creates a new version, and the arrows let you step between versions. Edit opens the text directly, Upload New Guide replaces it with a file, and Export Guide downloads it.

When you’re happy, click Program Guide. That turns the guide into real sections and activities on the agenda. From then on the Agenda is the source of truth. You can come back and Re-program Guide later, but it will replace what’s on the agenda.

Working on the agenda

Add Section offers Create New, Section Library, and Generate Section with AI. A section is a heading that groups activities, such as “Warm-up” or “Prioritization”.

Inside a section, Add Activity opens a grid of activity types. Pick one and you land on its setup form, headed Setup Activity. See Activity types for every option.

Once activities exist:

• Drag the handle on any row to reorder, including across sections.
• The row menu has Edit, Make Available or Make Unavailable, Duplicate, Move to another section, and Delete. Categorizations also get Connect.
• The section menu has Add Activity, Edit, Make Available or Make Unavailable, Duplicate, Save as Template, and Delete.
• Collapse All and Expand All tidy a long agenda.

The Flow column shows how activities feed each other. A filled node is a source brainstorm, a ring is where its themes land, and chips mark links that cross sections. It’s mostly about categorizations; see The categorization workflow.

Ask the Session Assistant

The sparkle icon on any section or activity opens the Session Assistant with that item in context. It can rewrite a section, draft a new one, or suggest what to add next. It proposes changes as cards you Approve & apply or Discard, and warns you if approving would replace activities that already have responses.

Availability

Every section and activity has an Available switch. Unavailable items are hidden from participants but stay on your agenda. Use it to hold back a follow-up activity until the group is ready for it, or to keep an optional activity in reserve.

Reusing guides

• Save as Template on a section, or Add to Library on the whole session from the Export menu, puts it in your company library.
• Import Agenda on a new session pulls from a Previous Session, the Company Library, or the Converge Global Library. Tick Keep your assessment options to carry over the answer options you wrote on Select, Rate, and Rank activities. Participant responses and brainstormed ideas are never copied.

Limits worth knowing

• Activity titles up to 250 characters, instructions up to 2,500, rich text blocks up to 20,000.
• Presentation decks attached to Info activities up to 200 MB.
• Programming a guide, or approving a rewrite from the Session Assistant, replaces activities. If participants have already responded to them, those responses are orphaned. Do your restructuring before the session starts.