Beyond the Chatbot: Why a Former Meta AI Director Is Building an AI Native Replacement for Office and Google Workspace

For the past two years, the enterprise AI conversation has largely revolved around “copilots” and AI assistants layered on top of existing tools like Microsoft Word or Google Sheets to help draft emails or fill in spreadsheet cells.

But Rohit Patel, a former director at Meta Superintelligence Labs, believes that approach is fundamentally flawed.

After eight years developing AI at Meta, with a focus on reinforcement learning and AI safety, Patel is departing to launch Ndoc, a startup he describes as an AI native replacement for Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. His departure, reported exclusively by TechCrunch, makes him the latest in a string of high profile exits from Meta, following the likes of Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan and AI for Work Head of Product Emily Dalton Smith.

The Problem with “Bolting On” AI

Patel’s critique of the current enterprise AI landscape is sharp. He argues that most companies are simply “attaching AI to spreadsheets” to fill cells automatically, rather than rethinking how work gets done.

“Companies are basically attaching AI to spreadsheets and it fills your cells for you,” Patel told TechCrunch. “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.”

Ndoc is designed to be that “tractor.” Instead of fragmenting work across Excel, PowerPoint, Tableau, and Replit, Patel has built a unified workspace with three core components:

The Stage: Where key findings live, including slide decks, dashboards, and simulations.
The Narrative: The “why” behind the data, featuring analyses, numbered citations, and generated figures.
The Model: The underlying datasets and Python scripts that power the output.

Trust Through Transparency

Drawing on his background in evaluating whether AI output is trustworthy, Patel has built Ndoc with transparency at its core. Because AI is generating the spreadsheets and decks that companies use to make critical decisions, users need to be able to verify the work.

Ndoc allows users to view the actual Python scripts used to generate documents. “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?'” Patel explained. “There’s nothing hidden behind the curtain here.”

Open Sourcing the Future of Work

Perhaps the most ambitious aspect of Ndoc is Patel’s plan to reinvent the file format itself. While the platform runs on a mixture of open source models, which Patel notes makes it cheaper to run than alternatives built on frontier models, it is the output that matters most.

Ndoc exports documents as a single .ndoc.html file that can be opened in any browser. Patel plans to open source this format, allowing other developers to build compatible apps. His desire to move quickly on this open standard was a primary reason for leaving Meta.

“Humans can only move at human pace, whereas…I can move at the pace of what AI can do,” he said.

A David vs. Goliath Challenge

Patel is entering a crowded arena. OpenAI recently launched “Space,” a shared workspace inside ChatGPT, and giants like Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic are all racing to integrate AI directly into the tools where people already work.

However, Patel’s team of three is betting that a from scratch, unified approach will win over knowledge workers tired of “ChatGPT copy paste” workflows. To hedge against the difficulty of changing user habits, Ndoc includes connectors so customers can import existing data from the tools they already use.

Patel has a high bar for the product, stating he won’t release something he doesn’t love using himself. “I have a graveyard of tools that did not meet that bar,” he admitted.

The “Execution is Cheap” Mentality

Despite being unfunded and facing massive competitors, Patel is moving with urgency. Ndoc is currently conducting an enterprise pilot and opening an alpha version to a limited number of customers on a waitlist.

He is holding off on raising capital until he has proof that the market loves the product, but he isn’t waiting for perfection before launching.

“Execution is extremely cheap…so go execute on a suboptimal plan and worry about it later,” Patel said. “By the time you make the best plan, the execution will be done by somebody else.”

Conclusion

Rohit Patel’s leap from Meta to Ndoc represents more than just another startup launch. It is a bet that the future of enterprise work will not be defined by AI features bolted onto legacy software, but by AI native platforms built from the ground up. While the challenge of unseating Microsoft and Google is immense, Patel’s focus on transparency, unified workflows, and an open file format offers a compelling vision for what productivity software could become. Whether Ndoc succeeds or not, his “get a tractor” philosophy serves as a timely reminder that truly transformative tools require rethinking the fundamentals, not just adding electricity to the old way of doing things.

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