Boston Dynamics names former Alexa chief Rohit Prasad as its new CEO

Prasad is an AI researcher who turned into a product builder. Most people have used his work without knowing his name.

• Amazon, 12 years: he helped build Alexa from its earliest days into a service used in hundreds of millions of households, according to the company's announcement.
• Top title: senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Amazon.
• Recent work: he led the development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family, AI models that businesses use.
• Before that: nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, leading machine learning research for US government and commercial projects.

The Boston Globe adds that his BBN years included speech recognition work. That makes the Alexa chapter look less like a lucky break and more like a straight line.

He has also lived in the Boston area for more than 25 years. Boston Dynamics points to that as a plus: local ties help with hiring and research partnerships.

Yes. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in December 2025 that Prasad would leave at the end of that year, Fortune reported.

Amazon folded its AGI group into a bigger organization that also covers custom chips and quantum computing. AWS senior vice president Peter DeSantis now leads it.

So Prasad spent about nine months between jobs. Boston Dynamics spent almost exactly the same nine months without a permanent boss.

Longtime CEO Robert Playter announced in February that he was stepping down. His last day was at the end of that month.

Playter had been at the company for about 30 years, TechCrunch reported, and he served as vice president of engineering and chief operating officer before taking the top job in 2020. Under him, Spot went on sale, Stretch reached warehouses and the electric Atlas arrived.

Since then, chief financial officer Amanda McMaster has run the company as interim CEO. Prasad takes over from her on October 7, 2026.

That's right. Boston Dynamics has changed owners more often than it has changed CEOs.

• 1992: Marc Raibert founds the company as a spinoff from MIT, where he was a professor. He stays CEO until 2020.
• 2013: Google's parent company Alphabet buys it.
• 2017: SoftBank buys it.
• 2020: Robert Playter becomes CEO.
• 2021: Hyundai Motor Group buys a controlling stake from SoftBank.
• 2026: Rohit Prasad becomes CEO number three.

The Robot Report points out the CEO count. Three leaders in 34 years is a short list for any tech company, let alone one that went through three owners.

Prasad is also expected to join the company's board of directors, subject to the usual approval process.

Most AI you know lives on a screen. You type a question, it types an answer. Physical AI is AI that runs a machine in the real world: it sees a box, decides how to grab it, and then actually grabs it.

Think of it like the difference between reading a cookbook and making dinner. Knowing the steps is one skill. Not dropping the eggs is another.

Boston Dynamics says Prasad's hiring "accelerates" its physical AI strategy. The plan is to combine its robot hardware with advanced AI and sell intelligent machines at scale.

"By bringing together advanced AI and robotics, we can build intelligent systems that create meaningful value in real-world environments, expand the reach of robotics across industries, and shape the next era of Physical AI," Prasad said in the announcement.

The bet is simple: Boston Dynamics already knows how to make robots move, and now it wants someone who has shipped AI to hundreds of millions of people to make them think.

A busy company. In just the past few weeks, Boston Dynamics has shipped a steady stream of news.

• Atlas got a new hand: a four-fingered design with no pinky, built for training in simulation before working in the real world. We covered it in our story on the new Atlas hand.
• A training center in Georgia: the Robotics Metaplant Application Center opened at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, to work out how Atlas fits into car production, The Robot Report says.
• Spot 5.2: the four-legged robot's latest software lets it use agentic workflows, meaning it can reason across several systems to finish a task. Its Orbit AIVI inspection feature now runs on Google Gemini.
• More space at home: the company plans to spend $100 million expanding its facilities in Waltham, Massachusetts.

The Boston Globe adds a bigger number. Boston Dynamics has announced plans for a factory able to build 30,000 Atlas robots a year, as it races humanoid makers in China.

The big picture: Spot and Stretch already work for paying customers. Atlas is the one still in development, and it is the robot where better AI could matter most.

Hyundai owns the company, and it builds cars, so its factories are the obvious first job site for Atlas.

"Boston Dynamics' industry-leading robotics, Rohit's proven ability to turn AI into products at global scale, and Hyundai Motor Group's modern manufacturing, logistics, and mobility capabilities give us a powerful foundation to build and scale Physical AI," said Jaehoon Chang, vice chair of Hyundai Motor Group and chair of the Boston Dynamics board.

Why it matters: Hyundai gives Boston Dynamics a built-in customer and a place to test robots on real assembly lines. Prasad's job is to turn those tests into products that other companies will buy too.

Prasad says he wants to "productize" robots that make workplaces safer, more productive and more efficient in industrial and commercial settings. That's a business word for one idea: robots that leave the lab and show up for work every day.

• You won't see a change tomorrow: Boston Dynamics sells to factories, warehouses and inspection teams, not homes. A new CEO doesn't change what's on store shelves.
• Smarter robots at work: if you work in a warehouse, a plant or a utility site, the Spot or Stretch you may meet there is likely to get more AI features over time.
• The Alexa lesson: Prasad's track record is taking AI from research to something millions use. Watch whether Atlas follows that path from test sites to real jobs.

In real life If your company uses Spot for inspections, the robot walking past the pipes is the kind of machine Prasad now runs. The changes will show up as software updates first, not as new hardware.