Let Papers Flow: AI Conferences Should Embrace Submission Explosion via Autonomous Review Pipelines

As AI tools accelerate literature search, experimentation, and drafting, AI conferences face a growing, structural submission explosion. This position paper argues that to survive this era of accelerated research, venues must formally adopt autonomous review pipelines as their core control plane. By deploying machine-first, human-governed systems to run the scalable first pass of review—handling routine evidence construction, integrity checks, and routing—conferences can stop treating abundance as a pathology. Making this automated control plane the spine of the review process preserves scarce human attention for high-stakes escalation, calibration, and edge cases. Furthermore, we show that establishing this infrastructure carries a profound downstream implication: it enables conferences to decouple baseline technical certification from seasonal curation, ultimately absorbing more submissions, shortening time-to-feedback, and tightening quality standards without breaking the human review commons or requiring perpetual committee inflation.