The humanoid robotics landscape is witnessing a major leadership shift. On October 7, 2026, Boston Dynamics officially appointed Rohit Prasad as its new Chief Executive Officer. Bringing over two decades of artificial intelligence expertise, Prasad succeeds interim CEO Amanda McMaster, signaling a decisive pivot toward large-scale commercialization and cognitive robotics.
From Alexa to Physical AI
Rohit Prasad joins Boston Dynamics following a highly influential 12-year tenure at Amazon. As the Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Prasad was instrumental in scaling Alexa into a ubiquitous AI assistant.
His transition to Boston Dynamics highlights the industry’s rapid convergence around Physical AI - the integration of advanced foundation models into physical robotic hardware. While Boston Dynamics has long been the undisputed leader in dynamic control and mobility (as demonstrated by its electric Atlas robot), the focus is now squarely on cognitive intelligence: teaching robots to autonomously perceive, reason, and adapt to unstructured environments.
Accelerating Commercialization
Boston Dynamics, now a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Group, has successfully productized the Spot quadruped and Stretch logistics robot. However, the commercial deployment of the bipedal Atlas remains the ultimate frontier.
Under Prasad’s leadership, the company aims to accelerate the deployment of intelligent machines into industrial and eventually everyday environments. This move positions Boston Dynamics to compete aggressively against emerging players like Figure AI and AgiBot, who have recently pushed hard on the narrative of combining LLMs (Large Language Models) with humanoid kinematics.
By bringing in a heavy-hitting AI software leader to helm a world-class hardware engineering firm, Boston Dynamics is making a clear statement: the next breakthrough in robotics won’t just be about how a robot moves, but how it thinks.