Boston Dynamics is now run by an AI executive rather than a roboticist. Hyundai Motor Group said on October 7 that Rohit Prasad, the former Amazon senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence, is the robotics maker's new chief executive, effective immediately. Prasad is also expected to join the board of directors, subject to the relevant approvals.
Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon. He joined a then-secret project backed by founder Jeff Bezos in 2013 and helped turn it into Alexa, a consumer AI platform that grew to roughly 100 million households and more than 500 million devices worldwide. Before leaving Amazon at the end of 2025, he led development of the Nova family of foundation models. His earlier career included nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he led machine-learning research for US government and commercial programs.
The appointment fills a seat that had been empty since February, when longtime CEO Robert Playter stepped down after three decades at the company and CFO Amanda McMaster took over on an interim basis. Prasad becomes only the third permanent CEO in Boston Dynamics' history, after founder Marc Raibert, who ran the company from 1992 to 2020, and Playter.
Hyundai framed the hire in product terms rather than research terms. Prasad was chosen for his proven expertise and execution capabilities in AI, the group said, adding that his ability to turn AI research into products and services, rather than leaving it at the research stage, was a key strength. Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the Boston Dynamics board, said Prasad's record of shipping AI at global scale, combined with Hyundai's manufacturing and logistics base, gives the company a strong foundation to build and scale physical AI.
The commercial backdrop is aggressive. Hyundai plans to deploy the Atlas humanoid at its Georgia Metaplant starting in 2028, and reporting by Gizmodo says the company has told investors it intends to build about 30,000 humanoid robots by 2028, roughly 25,000 of them destined for Hyundai and Kia plants and about 5,000 sold as retail products. Those figures are company plans relayed through press reports, not a shipping commitment. A Robotics Metaplant Application Center has already opened in Georgia to integrate Atlas into automotive manufacturing, and Hyundai is moving to acquire the remaining SoftBank stake to take full ownership of the robotics pioneer.
Prasad inherits a stack that has already pivoted toward foundation models. Atlas is paired with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics for perception, reasoning and tool use, NVIDIA is a strategic development partner, and the Spot quadruped's 5.2 software release added agentic workflows while the Orbit inspection platform now runs on Gemini as well. We will expand the application of robotics across industries, Prasad said in his inaugural remarks, pointing to semiconductors, shipbuilding and logistics as targets beyond automotive.
The timing reflects where the humanoid race actually is. TrendForce expects global humanoid shipments to pass 50,000 units in 2026, and Chosun Ilbo reports that China alone accounts for more than 70% of global shipments. Hyundai has hired seven big-tech executives this year alone, drawn from NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla and Google DeepMind across autonomous driving, vehicle software and voice AI. Handing Atlas to the executive who scaled Alexa is the clearest signal yet that Boston Dynamics intends to compete on AI and productization rather than on locomotion demos.
The risk is execution. Moving from a few hundred prototypes to tens of thousands of production robots requires supply-chain discipline, safety certification and data pipelines at a scale the company has never operated. Prasad's experience shipping consumer devices and cloud AI at Amazon will be tested in a domain where failures are physical rather than conversational, and where a stalled Atlas line in 2027 would be far more expensive than a delayed software release.
Comments (0)
Log in to join the discussion
Log InNo comments yet