Prasad previously served as an Amazon senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and AGI. Boston Dynamics credits him with helping build and scale Alexa and creating Amazon’s Nova foundation-model family. Before Amazon, he spent almost 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies working on machine learning for government and commercial applications.
The appointment follows Robert Playter’s departure as CEO in February. Reuters reported at the time that investors interpreted the change as a possible move toward faster commercialization after a period focused heavily on research and development.
Prasad will oversee a portfolio spanning Spot, Boston Dynamics’ quadruped inspection robot; Stretch, its logistics robot; and Atlas, the electric humanoid platform still under development. The company framed his appointment around combining its robot hardware with advanced AI and expanding commercial Physical AI applications. It did not announce new deployment targets, financial projections or a revised product timetable.
The leadership change comes as Hyundai prepares to use Atlas in manufacturing. The automaker has said it plans to begin deploying the humanoid at its Georgia plant in 2028, initially for parts sequencing, while working toward production capacity of 30,000 robots annually. Those targets predate Prasad’s appointment and were not revised in the announcement.
