Boston Dynamics taps Amazon AI veteran to lead physical AI push

Boston Dynamics has named Rohit Prasad, an artificial intelligence (AI) veteran who helped build Alexa and lead Amazon’s foundation-model efforts, as its new chief executive officer as it moves to fuse AI with advanced robotics. Prasad, who joins the company Wednesday, will lead Boston Dynamics’ push to commercialize intelligent robots and expand physical AI applications across industries, the company said. Before joining Boston Dynamics, Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he served as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence. He joined Amazon in 2013 during Alexa’s early development and later led work on Amazon Nova, a family of foundation models developed for generative AI applications. Prasad previously spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he worked on machine-learning research and applications for government and commercial customers. Boston Dynamics said Prasad’s experience turning AI research into products, platforms and business ecosystems would help accelerate commercialization of intelligent robotic sys