Rohit Prasad's appointment as Boston Dynamics CEO is a deliberate departure from the robotics industry's usual executive pipeline. Rather than promoting from within or recruiting a hardware-focused executive from a competitor, the company chose someone whose most recent role, head scientist for Alexa at Amazon, was squarely about large-scale AI systems with no direct robotics hardware experience.
The choice reflects a specific read on where robotics companies currently lose: not in actuator design or mechanical reliability, where Boston Dynamics already leads, but in the onboard intelligence that lets a robot operate with less constant human oversight, the same capability gap competing humanoid robotics companies have independently identified as their harder unsolved problem.