Boston Dynamics hands Atlas’s factory push to AI veteran Rohit Prasad

Boston Dynamics on October 6, 2026 appointed Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s former senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence, as chief executive, effective October 7. The Hyundai-controlled company is handing the commercial push for its Atlas humanoid to an executive who built AI products at scale, not robots.

Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he built Alexa and more recently led development of the Amazon Nova foundation models, according to the company’s announcement. Before that he spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies leading machine-learning research. Amazon announced his exit on December 17, 2025, in a reorganisation of its AI leadership. He is expected to join the Boston Dynamics board, pending approvals.

Why did Boston Dynamics pick an AI executive?

The board said so directly. Jaehoon Chang, vice chair of Hyundai Motor Group and chair of the Boston Dynamics board, cited “Rohit’s proven ability to turn AI into products at global scale” as the reason for the hire. Prasad’s own statement framed the company the same way: “Boston Dynamics is uniquely positioned to advance Physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise.” The announcement says the aim is to combine the company’s robotics with advanced AI to commercialise intelligent machines.

Hardware is not where Boston Dynamics is short. Atlas received a new four-finger, 13-degree-of-freedom hand on October 1, designed to be trained in simulation with reinforcement learning. The harder step is turning learned behaviour into dependable work on a production line. At its August 26 investor day, Hyundai set 2028 for Atlas on its Georgia plant’s lines and announced a US robot plant with 30,000 units of annual capacity. Those are product and deployment targets, and Prasad’s résumé is about getting software into hundreds of millions of homes.

What changes after seven months without a permanent CEO?

Robert Playter, a 30-year company veteran who became CEO in 2020, announced on February 10 that he would step down at the end of that month; chief financial officer Amanda McMaster ran the company in the interim. The company did not stand still. The Robot Report lists Spot 5.2 with agentic workflow features, Orbit AIVI now running on Google Gemini, a Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai’s Georgia site and a planned $100 million expansion of its Waltham, Massachusetts facilities. Seoul Economic Daily reports that the technology Boston Dynamics develops under Prasad will be tested across Hyundai Motor Group’s manufacturing, logistics and mobility businesses.

The hire also completes a shift away from the founding engineering lineage. Raibert, who founded the company in 1992 and led it until 2020, now runs the Robotics and AI Institute, which SoftBank has agreed to buy from Hyundai, as reported on September 18. Playter was an engineer; Prasad is a machine-learning scientist.

Whether that is the right bet is not settled. It assumes the bottleneck for Atlas is models and data rather than reliability, maintenance and unit cost, where a robotics operator would be the natural pick. Prasad’s own record is mixed: Alexa reached hundreds of millions of households, but Fortune reported that his December exit followed criticism that Amazon’s AI work had fallen behind rivals. The first test is concrete. Hyundai’s 2028 date for Atlas at its Georgia plant is now Prasad’s to deliver.