Meta AI director Rohit Patel leaves to take on Microsoft Office and Google Workspace

After eight years developing AI for Meta, Rohit Patel is departing the company, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The former director at Meta Superintelligence Labs has launched Ndoc, a startup he’s pitching as an AI-native replacement for Microsoft Office suite or Google Workspace.

Patel is the latest in a handful of high-profile departures from Meta following the exits of Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, AI researcher Andrew Tulloch, and Head of Product for AI-for-Work Emily Dalton Smith.

Patel designed Ndoc to be more than just another AI tool layered onto an existing workflow. The goal is to replace the fragmented way people work across tools like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Tableau, Replit, and “ChatGPT copy-paste” with one unified workspace that all colleagues can access, even if they’re not signed up for Ndoc. 

Ndoc brings three components together in one layout. The Stage tab is where presentations of key findings live, like slide decks, dashboards, simulations, or mini apps. The Narrative tab features analyses, numbered citations, generated figures, and generally the “why” behind the numbers. The Model tab is where underlying datasets and Python scripts are housed. 

The design reflects Patel’s background. During his tenure at Meta, Patel focused on reinforcement learning — a type of machine learning in which AI agents learn to make decisions through trial and error and maximize rewards — and evaluating whether AI output is trustworthy. Patel believes that if AI is going to build the spreadsheets and slide decks that companies use to make decisions, someone should be able to check its work. For instance, users can find the Python scripts used to create the 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?’ And you can verify that formula,” Patel said. “There’s nothing hidden behind the curtain here.”