After eight years building AI at Meta — most recently as a director at Meta Superintelligence Labs — Rohit Patel just walked away to take on the two most entrenched products in enterprise software, Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, with a startup called Ndoc, according to TechCrunch.
Patel follows a string of high-profile Meta exits — Joel Kaplan, Andrew Tulloch, Emily Dalton Smith — but he's the one trying to build the thing Meta never would: a replacement for the office suite itself.
Ndoc isn't another AI assistant bolted onto your spreadsheet. It collapses the fragmented workflow — Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit, the copy-paste dance with ChatGPT — into one workspace. Stage holds the presentation, Narrative the analysis with numbered citations, Model the datasets and Python scripts. Upload a dataset and you get the findings, the reasoning, and the code in one place.
The bet is verifiability. Patel's Meta work was reinforcement learning and judging whether AI output can be trusted; Ndoc assumes that if AI writes the spreadsheets companies decide on, someone should be able to check its work. "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."
He's also reinventing the file itself: documents export as a single .ndoc.html file that opens in any browser, a format he plans to open-source so developers can build compatible tools instead of locking users in like Microsoft and Google do.
The odds are steep: a team of three, no funding, an enterprise pilot and limited alpha today, beta in weeks, full launch next year. Meanwhile the labs are racing to plant their models inside the tools people already use — OpenAI launched Space, a shared workspace inside ChatGPT, just last month.
Patel thinks the labs have the wrong idea entirely. "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." His argument: the suite itself is the legacy, and the winner rebuilds the document from scratch, receipts attached.
— via TechCrunch