Boston Dynamics, the company behind the four-legged Spot robot and Atlas, a humanoid robot built in a human shape, has a new chief executive. On Tuesday, Oct. 6, it named Rohit Prasad, a longtime Amazon AI leader, as CEO, effective Wednesday, Oct. 7. The company says the appointment speeds up its push into physical AI: AI that senses and acts in the real world through machines such as robots and self-driving cars. It plans to combine its robots with advanced AI so it can sell them at scale.
Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he rose to senior vice president and head scientist. Boston Dynamics says he helped build Alexa from its earliest days into a voice assistant used in hundreds of millions of homes, and more recently led the team behind Amazon Nova, a family of AI models that businesses use. Before Amazon, he spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, leading machine-learning research for U.S. government and commercial customers. He is also expected to join the company's board once the usual approvals are complete.
The post has been filled on an interim basis since February, when Robert Playter stepped down as CEO. Chief financial officer Amanda McMaster has run the company since then. Prasad is only the company's third chief executive, after founder Marc Raibert, who led it from 1992 until 2020, and Playter. Hyundai Motor Group has controlled Boston Dynamics since it bought a controlling stake from SoftBank in 2021. Hyundai vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the board, says Boston Dynamics' robots, Prasad's record and Hyundai's factories and logistics together give the company a strong base to build and sell these machines at scale.
Boston Dynamics sells Spot for industrial inspections and Stretch, which moves boxes for shipping and retail companies. Atlas, which runs on electric motors, is still in development. In recent weeks the company opened a center at Hyundai's plant in Georgia to train Atlas for car-making work and showed a new four-finger hand for it.
The company has not said what Prasad will change first, how much he will be paid, or when Atlas will go on sale. Picking a leader from AI rather than robot engineering suggests the company sees the software that lets robots learn new tasks as central to its business, but whether that pays off will show only as new products reach customers.