Boston Dynamics hires ex-Amazon AI chief as CEO, a rare expansion signal in a layoff-heavy week
Boston Dynamics named Rohit Prasad as chief executive on October 6, effective the next day, installing a 12-year Amazon veteran to run the Hyundai-owned robotics maker's push into what the company calls "physical AI." The appointment lands in the same week that two other Boston-area employers moved in the opposite direction, making it a useful counter-data point against a regional and sector-wide pattern of AI-linked contraction.
A hire that bucks the local trend
On October 6, Cambridge-based HubSpot announced cuts of nearly 700 jobs, with departing staff receiving 20 to 30 weeks of severance; CEO Yamini Rangan told employees the move was meant to redirect resources toward AI rather than simply cut costs. A day later, Amazon said it would sublease more than half of its Seaport office tower in Boston, formalizing a retreat that began when the company moved leadership of its AI development efforts from Boston to Seattle in 2025. Set against that backdrop, Boston Dynamics' leadership hire and an accompanying $100 million commitment to expand its Waltham, Massachusetts facilities — including a roughly 323,000-square-foot site — register as the exception rather than the rule.
The executive's path tracks the industry's AI reshuffling
Prasad's appointment is itself a product of the AI leadership churn this site has tracked all year. He spent 12 years at Amazon as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence, where he helped scale Alexa into a mass-market conversational AI product and later led development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family — before departing as CEO Andy Jassy restructured Amazon's AI organization and handed the advanced-AI portfolio to AWS's Peter DeSantis. Prasad also spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies leading machine-learning research for government and commercial clients. He succeeds interim CEO Amanda McMaster, Boston Dynamics' CFO, who had run the company since Robert Playter stepped down in February 2026 after roughly three decades at the firm, the second CEO transition at Boston Dynamics in eight months.
We are thrilled to welcome Rohit to lead the company into this exciting new era of real-world physical AI, said Jaehoon Chang, vice chair of Hyundai Motor Group and chair of the Boston Dynamics board.
What the hire signals for Hyundai's robotics bet
Hyundai, which took a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics from SoftBank in 2021, is pairing the leadership change with product moves that make the AI mandate concrete rather than aspirational: Spot's version 5.2 update adds agentic workflows, its Orbit AIVI inspection software now runs on Google's Gemini models, and the company last week showed a redesigned four-fingered hand for its Atlas humanoid built for sim-to-real reinforcement learning. A new Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai's Georgia manufacturing site is training teams to integrate Atlas into vehicle production. Prasad, who has lived in the Boston area for more than 25 years, said in the announcement that the company is "uniquely positioned to advance physical AI through its world-class robotics expertise" and framed his mandate as turning that research into commercial products that improve safety and operational efficiency.
The broader read
The juxtaposition matters more than any single data point. Hiring announcements in AI have been scarce enough this year that this site's AI Hiring Heatmap has sat at its floor for two consecutive rounds, with layoffs and executive exits dominating the talent narrative. A CEO hire plus a facility build-out at a hardware-and-robotics company is a different kind of signal than the software-sector cost cuts that have driven most 2026 headlines, and it suggests capital is still flowing toward physical-AI commercialization even as SaaS and enterprise-software firms treat AI as a reason to shrink headcount. Whether Prasad's Amazon pedigree translates into revenue growth at Boston Dynamics — a company Hyundai has yet to turn into a disclosed profit center — is the open question investors will watch over the next several quarters.