Robotics · 8 October 2026 · 4 min read

Boston Dynamics puts an Amazon AI lead in charge

Rohit Prasad, who ran Alexa and Amazon’s AGI group, became chief executive on 7 October. The company he inherits is still trying to turn Atlas into factory work.

A humanoid robot standing beside unfinished car bodies on a factory line. — Illustration. Not a photograph of the machines or the event in the story.

Boston Dynamics said Rohit Prasad became chief executive on 7 October. He had been senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon. Reuters reported that he succeeds Robert Playter, who stepped down in February. Hyundai Motor Group owns the company.

The appointment is a statement about where the company thinks the work is. Boston Dynamics already knows how to make a machine balance and walk. Prasad’s record is shipping AI that ordinary people used, not building the next actuator. The company’s own line is that he is there to push physical AI into commercial use.

Hyundai has said it wants a factory able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, and to start putting them across its own manufacturing sites then. That is a capacity target from the owner, not a count of Atlas units doing unsupervised shifts today. A new chief executive does not move that date.