Boston Dynamics: Rohit Prasad is new CEO

Boston Dynamics announced on 6 October that Rohit Prasad takes over the company. He spent 12 years at Amazon, where he led Alexa and artificial general intelligence, and created the Amazon Nova models. The reading that Hyundai is putting in a product person, not a roboticist, is ours.

In short

Rohit Prasad is Boston Dynamics' chief executive officer from 7 October 2026. The appointment was announced by the company on 6 October.
He comes from Amazon (12 years, Alexa and AGI, the Amazon Nova models) and Raytheon BBN (nearly 14 years, machine learning).
Atlas, the electric humanoid platform, is “currently in development” per the same release. The release does not say who was CEO before.

Checked on7 October 2026Responsible editorTsvetelin IvanovHow we workMethod · Corrections

The man who built Alexa is going to build robots.

In the list of places the company gives for Rohit Prasad, there is no robot.

The facts: on 6 October 2026 Boston Dynamics announced the appointment of Rohit Prasad as chief executive officer (CEO), effective 7 October 2026. Before that Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence (AGI); per the company he built Alexa from its earliest days into a service used in hundreds of millions of households and led development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family. Before Amazon he spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, leading machine-learning research for U.S. government and commercial use. He has been based in the Boston area for over 25 years. Subject to the relevant approval process, he is also expected to join the board of directors. Jaehoon Chang, Vice Chair of Hyundai Motor Group and Chair of the Board of Directors at Boston Dynamics, says Prasad leads the company into a new era of “Physical AI”. The company's portfolio is Spot, Stretch and Atlas, the electric humanoid platform currently in development. The release does not say who was CEO before him.

What the company says it wants: to turn AI into products and sell them at scale. Chang says it outright when he speaks of “Rohit's proven ability to turn AI into products at global scale”.

In charge comes a man whose work is in hundreds of millions of homes, the company writes.

This is our reading. The board chair comes from Hyundai, and when the company picks as CEO someone who has turned AI into a product, the company's question moves from the lab to the sale.

The backstory On 16 July Hyundai announced officially that it is pursuing the purchase of SoftBank's entire stake in Boston Dynamics, and that it plans to bring Atlas into its Metaplant America plant from 2028. The statement gave no amount.

Of the three robots in the portfolio, Atlas is the only one the company calls “in development”. If our reading is right, that is where the new CEO gets measured.

The visual is generated code art. No third-party images.

The man who built Alexa at Amazon becomes Boston Dynamics CEO from 7 October

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