Boston Dynamics hires Alexa's creator: Rohit Prasad leads the robotics pioneer

As of Wednesday, Boston Dynamics has a new CEO, and he doesn't come from robotics. Rohit Prasad takes over on October 7; he spent twelve years at Amazon, most recently as chief scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence. The position had been vacant since February 10, with the CFO leading the company in an interim capacity for eight months.

For the first time since its founding in 1992, the company is not led by a roboticist. Founder Marc Raibert came from MIT research, and his predecessor Robert Playter spent thirty years at the company. Hyundai justified the choice by saying Prasad can turn breakthroughs in Physical AI into commercial success. He'll need to: starting in 2028, up to 30,000 humanoids per year are expected to roll off the production line. Amazon put Prasad's Nova models into maintenance mode in July.

The move is an admission, and a significant one. Boston Dynamics solved locomotion before anyone else could, with two decades of advantage in mechanics, control, and balance. Precisely this advantage now matters least. What's missing is the model that correctly assesses unknown situations, and so Hyundai isn't hiring a joint designer anymore, but a man who operated models for hundreds of millions of devices.

The urgency is evident from production. Former employees told Semafor in May that Boston Dynamics builds four Atlas units per month, and with Playter, both the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer should have gone too—the board was frustrated with the delays. At the Metaplant in Savannah, a capacity of 30,000 humanoids annually is supposed to come online in 2028: 25,000 for Hyundai and Kia factories, 5,000 for commercial sales. From four units a month to well over 2,500—that's two years.

Precisely when it comes to models, Prasad's track record is mixed. Alexa runs in hundreds of millions of households, yet Amazon's device division lost over 25 billion dollars between 2017 and 2021 according to Wall Street Journal research. In July, Amazon put most Nova models for text, image, and video into maintenance mode because they failed to meet expectations, and closed its AGI research office in San Francisco. So Boston Dynamics is hiring the man whose model family his former employer just shelved, hiring him precisely for the model question. Read another way: whoever gets Alexa into hundreds of millions of devices knows the difference between a demo and a product that works every morning. That's where the humanoid industry has been failing so far.

For Swiss companies, this changes nothing in the short term, but it will in the medium term. Anyone wanting an Atlas in 2028 will compete with Hyundai and Kia for those 5,000 units that actually make it to market. In the ongoing business with quadrupeds, the toughest competitor is anyway in Zurich. ANYbotics, spun out of ETH, raised around 150 million dollars in September 2025 and sends its ANYmal into the same facilities where Boston Dynamics sends Spot. The company is run by people who designed the robot themselves.