The full process explained

From career documents to
AI profile in 4 steps

Distills turns your resume, portfolio, and career history into a live, conversational AI profile that answers questions for you — any time, without you in the room. Here is exactly how it works.

Build your AI profile → See the 4 steps

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What Distills is

A hosted AI profile built from your actual career history

Published March 18, 2026 · by Mike Jones, Distills

Distills is an AI-powered professional identity platform. Professionals upload their career documents, complete a structured AI interview, and receive a hosted profile page at distills.app/c/your-name where visitors can have a live conversation with their AI — asking questions in their own words and getting specific, first-person answers drawn from that person's actual experience.

The AI speaks as you: "I led a team of eight engineers on that project," "My approach to client work has always been," "The thing I am most proud of in that role is..." Every response is generated in real time from a structured knowledge base built specifically from your documents and your interview answers. The AI does not draw from generic training data when answering questions about your career — only from what you actually documented and said.

The full process — from uploading your first document to having a live profile link you can share — takes under an hour for most professionals. The four steps below explain exactly what happens at each stage.

The process

The 4 steps in detail

Each step builds on the last. Most professionals complete the full process in 45 to 60 minutes.

1
🕑 ~5 minutes

Step 1: Upload your career documents

Start with the career documents you already have. Distills accepts PDF and plain text files. The most common uploads are a resume or CV, a LinkedIn profile export (the PDF download available from your LinkedIn settings), portfolio write-ups or case studies, project summaries, a professional bio, or any combination of these. You are not required to upload any specific document type — a single resume PDF is enough to begin.

The AI reads each document and extracts structured information about your roles, responsibilities, projects, skills, timelines, and professional context. A well-formatted resume with clear sections and bullet points will yield a particularly clean extraction, but heavily designed resumes and informal project notes are processed equally well. The more material you upload, the more complete the initial knowledge base will be before the interview even starts.

Upload is fast — for most documents it completes in under a minute. Once your documents are processed, the system moves you directly into the interview step.

2
🕑 20–30 minutes

Step 2: Complete the AI interview

The AI interview is the most important part of the Distills process. It runs 20 to 30 exchanges — a structured conversation designed to draw out experience, professional stories, and context that career documents alone cannot fully represent. Documents capture what you did and where you worked. The interview captures how you worked, why you made the decisions you made, what you learned, and what you are most proud of.

The interview asks about specific projects and your role in them, professional challenges you have overcome, how you approach different kinds of problems, what your working style is, and how you describe your own expertise to someone unfamiliar with your field. These are the questions that come up in real professional conversations — recruiter screens, client discovery calls, networking meetings — and the answers you give here are what your AI will draw from when a visitor asks something similar.

The interview takes approximately 20 to 30 minutes at a comfortable typing pace. If you prefer to speak rather than type, voice-to-text tools work well and can reduce the time significantly. There is no time limit on any individual answer — the quality of your responses matters more than the speed. Longer, more detailed answers to interview questions directly produce better AI profile responses for your visitors.

3
🕑 Automatic — a few minutes

Step 3: Distills builds your knowledge base

Once the interview is complete, Distills automatically generates a structured knowledge base containing approximately 100 to 150 individual entries. Each entry is a discrete, self-contained fact, story, skill description, professional context point, or project summary derived from your documents and interview responses. This step runs automatically — you do not need to do anything while it completes.

The knowledge base is the engine behind your AI profile. When a visitor asks your AI a question, the system runs a semantic search across all 100 to 150 entries, retrieves the most relevant ones, and generates a response in first person using exactly that content. Because the AI draws only from your knowledge base, responses are grounded in your actual documented experience. The AI will not invent credentials, projects, or expertise that are not represented in your knowledge base.

All users — including those on the free tier — can download their complete knowledge base as a knowledge.jsonl file at any time. Free tier users also receive chatbot-widget.js, an embeddable script they can add to any website to host the chat interface themselves. Pro and Career users get the hosted profile page at distills.app in addition to the downloadable files.

4
🕑 Instant

Step 4: Share your AI profile link

Pro and Career tier users receive a hosted profile page at distills.app/c/your-name — a permanent URL you control. The profile displays your name, photo, professional bio, and a set of starter prompts that invite visitors to begin a conversation. The core of the page is a live chat interface where visitors type questions and receive real-time streaming responses from your AI.

Share the link anywhere you currently share your resume or LinkedIn URL: in your email signature, your LinkedIn About section, consulting proposals, application cover letters, speaker bios, or networking messages. The AI handles all visitor conversations automatically — you do not need to be online or available. A visitor reaching your profile at 2am in a different time zone gets the same quality of response as one who visits during your working hours.

You can update your profile at any time by re-running the wizard with new documents or a fresh interview. When you do, the underlying knowledge base is replaced and your profile immediately reflects the update. Your URL stays the same — links you have already shared continue to work and point to your updated profile.

The visitor perspective

What visitors experience when they reach your profile

A visitor who arrives at your Distills profile sees a clean, focused page with your name, photo (Pro/Career), and a brief professional bio. A set of starter prompts — short suggested questions — appears below the bio to invite engagement. Visitors are not required to use the starters; they can type any question they want.

When a visitor submits a question, the AI retrieves the relevant entries from your knowledge base and streams a response in real time — the same way ChatGPT or Claude streams responses, word by word as they are generated. The response is written in first person as you: specific, grounded, and drawn from your actual documented experience. A visitor asking "have you worked with early-stage startups?" gets a real answer citing real companies and real projects, not a generic paragraph about startup experience.

If a visitor asks about something that is not in your knowledge base, your AI says so honestly rather than fabricating an answer. This is a deliberate design choice — professional identity tools that invent experience are harmful, not helpful. Visitors who receive honest "I don't have details on that" responses tend to trust the profile more, not less, because it demonstrates that the other answers are grounded in reality.

Visitors can ask as many questions as they want during a session. There is no time limit and no account required to chat. On Pro and Career profiles, visitors can also download a copy of the owner's resume directly from the profile page.

See a live AI profile in action

This is what a visitor experiences when they chat with a Distills profile. Ask it anything about Mike Jones's background, projects, or expertise.

Open the demo profile
Your dashboard

What you see in your analytics dashboard

Pro and Career tier users have access to an analytics dashboard that shows how visitors are engaging with their AI profile. The dashboard is updated in real time as visits and conversations occur.

The key metrics and views available in the dashboard:

📈 Traffic overview

Weekly and monthly view counts, chat sessions started, and bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who viewed your profile but did not ask a question.

💬 Questions asked

A log of the actual questions visitors typed into your AI profile. This is one of the most valuable signals available — it tells you exactly what the people you are trying to reach want to know about you.

📋 Topic breakdown

A doughnut chart showing which professional topics came up most in visitor conversations — leadership, technical skills, specific industries, project types, and so on.

🔎 Knowledge gaps

Questions visitors asked that your AI could not fully answer — areas where your knowledge base has gaps you could fill by re-running the wizard with more material or a more detailed interview.

📅 30-day trend

A line chart showing questions asked per day over the past 30 days, so you can correlate traffic spikes with specific sharing events — a LinkedIn post, an outreach campaign, or a new job application.

🔴 Hit-wall events

Instances where a visitor reached the free-tier chat limit on your profile. If you are on the free tier, this indicates visitors who wanted to continue the conversation and could not.

The analytics dashboard turns every profile visit into feedback you can act on. If you notice that visitors consistently ask about a particular skill or project type you have not documented well, that is a signal to update your knowledge base. If a specific sharing event drives a spike of visits, the topic breakdown tells you what those visitors cared about most.

Privacy and data

How your data is handled and what you own

Distills is built on Cloudflare's infrastructure — your documents, knowledge base, and profile data are stored in Cloudflare R2 object storage and D1 database, distributed globally across Cloudflare's edge network. No data is processed on third-party servers outside of Anthropic's Claude API, which is used solely to run the interview and generate the knowledge base. Anthropic's API terms prohibit using API inputs to train models.

✓
Your documents are not used to train AI models. Uploaded files are processed to extract structured content and stored securely. They are not shared with Anthropic for training purposes and are not accessible to other Distills users.
✓
You own your knowledge base. All users can download their complete knowledge.jsonl file at any time. Your knowledge base is portable — it is a standard JSONL file you can use outside of Distills.
✓
Free tier profiles are not indexed by search engines. Free profiles are served with X-Robots-Tag: noindex headers. Only Pro and Career profiles are indexed. You choose when your profile is discoverable.
✓
Account deletion removes your data. When you delete your account, your uploaded files, knowledge base, and profile data are removed from Distills storage. Your profile URL stops working immediately.
✓
No passwords. Distills uses magic link authentication — you log in via a link sent to your email. There is no password to manage or for a breach to expose.

The full privacy policy is available at distills.app/privacy.html. If you have specific data handling questions not covered there, contact the team directly through the email on that page.

Plans and pricing

What you get at each tier

All four steps above — document upload, AI interview, knowledge base generation, and the downloadable output files — are available on the free tier. The paid tiers add the hosted profile page, analytics, and additional profile features.

Free
$0 forever
Full AI interview & knowledge base generation
Download knowledge.jsonl
Embeddable widget script
No hosted profile at distills.app
Pro
$199 / year
Everything in Free
Hosted profile at distills.app/c/your-name
Custom URL slug
Profile photo & bio
Analytics dashboard
Resume download for visitors
Career
$399 / year
Everything in Pro
Job Description Mode Soon
Optimized for active job seekers

Monthly billing is also available: Pro at $24/month, Career at $49/month. See full pricing details →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Straight answers to the questions we hear most often about how Distills works.

Distills accepts PDF and plain text files. The most common documents professionals upload are a resume or CV, a LinkedIn export (the PDF version available from your LinkedIn profile), a portfolio write-up or case study, a professional bio, or project summaries. You can upload any combination of these — there is no single required document type. A standard resume PDF is sufficient to get started. The more material you upload, the more context the AI has, but the interview step fills in significant depth regardless of how sparse your documents are.
The AI interview runs 20 to 30 exchanges and takes most professionals 20 to 30 minutes at a typing pace. If you use a voice-to-text tool to speak your answers rather than type them, the interview can take as little as 10 to 15 minutes. The interview asks about your most meaningful projects, your approach to your work, challenges you have overcome, and how you describe your own expertise. There is no time limit — you can take as long as you need for each answer. Longer, more detailed answers produce a higher-quality knowledge base.
Yes. You can re-run the full wizard at any time to generate a fresh knowledge base from updated documents or a new interview. Your profile URL stays the same — only the underlying knowledge base is replaced. Pro and Career users can also update their profile photo, bio, and starter prompts from the dashboard without re-running the interview. A direct editing interface for individual knowledge base entries is on the roadmap for a future release.
Your hosted profile at distills.app/c/your-name is publicly accessible to anyone with the link. Pro and Career profiles are indexable by search engines, which means Google can discover and list your profile in search results for your name or relevant queries. Free tier profiles are marked noindex and are not crawled by search engines, but they are still accessible to anyone who has the direct URL. You control who you share your link with — Distills does not have a discovery directory or a way for strangers to find your profile without the link.
Distills AI profiles are designed to be accurate by construction. The AI only responds using content from your knowledge base — it does not draw from general AI training data when answering questions about you. If a visitor asks about something that is not in your knowledge base, your AI will say so rather than guess. This is a deliberate design choice: a professional identity tool that fabricates experience would be harmful, not helpful. The accuracy of your AI profile is directly correlated with the completeness of your documents and the depth of your interview answers.
Your uploaded files are processed to extract structured content and stored securely in Cloudflare R2 cloud storage. They are not shared with third parties and are not used to train AI models. The knowledge base extracted from your documents and interview is yours to download at any time as a knowledge.jsonl file. If you delete your account, your files and knowledge base are removed from Distills storage.
The free tier runs the full AI interview and generates your complete knowledge base. You get two downloadable files: knowledge.jsonl (your structured knowledge base) and chatbot-widget.js (an embeddable script you can add to any website). What the free tier does not include is a hosted profile page at distills.app. Pro ($199/year or $24/month) gives you a hosted profile at distills.app/c/your-name, a custom URL slug, profile photo, bio, analytics, and a resume download button for visitors. Career ($399/year or $49/month) adds Job Description Mode, which is designed for active job seekers matching their profile to specific roles.

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