If you were naive like me and downloaded the IEEE conference template from IEEE’s website you may have experienced a puzzling error:
“Something’s wrong–perhaps a missing \item”
There is no point in trying to fix this as the reason this is happening is because the IEEE website gives you a template with an old IEEEtran.bst file. Go download the new version of IEEEtran.bst here from CTAN. Then delete all intermediate files (.aux, .bbl, etc.) and recompile. This worked for me.
Lesson learned: Never download IEEE templates from IEEE. Always use CTAN.