Rohit Prasad's appointment as Boston Dynamics CEO pairs a hardware-and-robotics-focused company with a leader whose career has been built almost entirely in large-scale AI systems, most recently as Amazon's head scientist for Alexa. It's a leadership profile that signals where the company's board believes its next competitive battle actually sits.
Robotics companies have increasingly concluded that the mechanical engineering problem of building a capable robot body is more tractable than the AI problem of making it operate intelligently with minimal supervision, and Prasad's hiring is the clearest signal yet that Boston Dynamics' leadership agrees, even if it means recruiting a CEO with no prior robotics hardware experience.