Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves after eight years to launch Ndoc, an AI-native Office and Workspace rival

Patel is the latest senior figure to depart Meta. Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch and Emily Dalton Smith, head of product for AI-for-Work, have also left, according to TechCrunch.

Ndoc places three panels in a single layout. The Stage tab holds presentations of key findings, including slide decks, dashboards, simulations and small apps. The Narrative tab carries analyses, numbered citations, generated figures and the reasoning behind the numbers. The Model tab houses the underlying datasets and Python scripts.

The design follows Patel's work at Meta, where he focused on reinforcement learning and on evaluating whether AI output can be trusted. His argument is that if AI is going to produce the spreadsheets and slide decks companies use to make decisions, someone should be able to check its work, which is why the scripts that generated a document stay visible. "Even if you don't know any Python, you can ask [the AI chat] to explain, 'Hey, what does this script do? Which line has my formula?' And you can verify that formula," Patel said. "There's nothing hidden behind the curtain here."

In use, a customer uploads a dataset and asks Ndoc to run an analysis and write a narrative about the findings, with document-specific settings for audience, tone and memory. "It maintains a memory across your person, that particular document, your team, and your company," Patel said.

Patel says Ndoc is built and fine-tuned on a mixture of open-source models, and that running it costs considerably less than alternatives built on frontier models. Early trial users, he said, were more interested in something else. "I thought that's what people would be excited about, but people don't care about that," he said. "What people are excited about is that they love seeing all their end-to-end in one place."

His larger aim is to change the file itself. Documents can be exported as a single ".ndoc.html" file that opens in any browser, and Patel plans to open source the format so other developers can build compatible apps without locking users into Ndoc the way many companies are locked into Microsoft or Google. That ambition was part of why he left Meta: inside a large company, agreeing on an open format would require input from "hundreds of people and opinions on how the format should look." Patel said he wanted to move faster. "Humans can only move at human pace, whereas…I can move at the pace of what AI can do."

The bet is a large one for a founder with a team of three and no funding. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, SpaceXAI and Google have all released enterprise AI tools that connect to Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and other workplace apps so their models can operate inside those tools, and OpenAI launched Space, a shared workspace inside ChatGPT, last month.

Patel acknowledges Space could pose a threat but argues the labs have the wrong approach. "Companies are basically attaching AI to spreadsheets and it fills your cells for you," he said. "It just sort of kills my soul. This is like if you just figured out electricity, and then you decided the best use case is to put lights on my bulls that till my soil. No. Get a tractor."

He says he understands why habits are hard to change and why entire workflows are difficult to replace, which is why Ndoc includes connectors for importing data from tools customers already use. "My bar was that I'm not going to release anything I don't love using," he said. "I have very optimized AI workflows for everything I do. If I start using this tool, and I keep going back to my workflows, I haven't built a good enough tool…I have a graveyard of tools that did not meet that bar."