Former Meta AI Director Launches Ndoc to Rival Microsoft Office and Google Workspace

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Rohit Patel, ex-Meta AI director, has founded Ndoc, an AI-native workspace aiming to unify and replace tools like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace with a single collaborative platform.

Rohit Patel, who spent eight years at Meta focusing on AI evaluation and reinforcement learning, has left the company to launch a startup named Ndoc. The new venture positions itself as an AI-native alternative to widely used productivity suites such as Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Patel’s departure from Meta follows other notable exits and reflects his ambition to reinvent how enterprise workspaces function.

Ndoc combines three integrated components within a unified interface: the Stage tab for presenting findings through slides, dashboards, simulations, or mini apps; the Narrative tab for in-depth analyses, citations, and generated visuals explaining the data; and the Model tab housing underlying datasets and Python scripts related to the workspace documents. This design enables transparency and trust, as users can review and verify AI-generated content through accessible Python scripts—even without programming knowledge—by querying the AI chat interface.

Patel’s background in reinforcement learning and assessing AI trustworthiness shaped his approach since Ndoc aims not just to automate office tasks but to unify disparate workflows that currently rely on multiple fragmented tools. Users can upload datasets for automated analysis and narrative creation, personalize documents with contextual information like audience and tone, and benefit from persistent memory across documents, teams, and organizations.

Distinctively, Ndoc documents export as standalone “.ndoc.html” files that open in any browser. Patel intends to open source this format to foster an ecosystem beyond lock-in to any single platform, marking a departure from traditional proprietary document standards. This open-source ambition motivated his decision to leave Meta, where open-format consensus might be slow and complex.

Operating on a small founding team and currently without external funding, Ndoc has launched an enterprise pilot and limited alpha access, with a public beta expected soon and full launch planned for 2027. Patel prioritizes user adoption and enthusiasm as a prerequisite to raising funds. He contrasts Ndoc’s vision with competitors like OpenAI’s Space and other AI labs integrating AI into existing tools, which he views as incremental rather than transformative.

By rethinking the office suite from the ground up and leveraging AI capabilities holistically, Patel hopes to create a faster, more cohesive workflow experience that surpasses merely “putting lights on a bull,” aspiring instead to build the equivalent of a digital tractor for modern knowledge work.