Who is Rohit Prasad? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announces departure of AI exec after 12 years

Rohit Prasad, the Indian-origin Amazon AI chief, is set to leave the company after a 12-year stint. Sharing the news on 18 December, CEO Andy Jassy said, “Rohit Prasad…has decided to leave Amazon at the end of this year.”

In a blog post, Jassy shared that Rohit had joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, “to help us build a conversational AI that could make customers' lives easier”.

“Rohit helped Alexa grow from an ambitious idea into a service that now touches hundreds of millions of customers' lives every day,” he said.

For the past two years, Rohit led the creation of Amazon Nova and Amazon's Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) unit, “building twelve state-of-the-art foundation models with industry-leading price-performance that are now being used by tens of thousands of companies across almost all industries and use cases.”

The AGI team oversees the company’s Nova-branded AI models and the digital brains of the Alexa voice assistant.

Noting Rohit's achievements, Jassy said he had built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention.

He described Rohit as “missionary, passionate, and selfless,” adding, “I'm grateful for his leadership, his technical vision, and everything he's built here.”

Who is Rohit Prasad?

Rohit Prasad, a native of Ranchi, Jharkhand, completed his degree in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. He moved to the USA to pursue an MS in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology.

Rohit began his career at BBN Technologies, a company famed for its role in creating ARPANET—the predecessor to the internet.

Over the course of his 14-year tenure, he advanced from a staff scientist to Senior Director, handling critical speech, language, and multimedia technologies.

In 2024, TIME Magazine recognised him on its ‘TIME100 Most Influential People in AI 2024’ list, solidifying his place among the most powerful tech minds.

Who will take over as Amazon AI chief now?

Andy Jassy announced that Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran, will lead the new organisation that will drive the company's most expansive AI models, silicon development, and quantum computing.

Pieter Abbeel, one of the world's leading AI researchers and co-founder of Covariant, will lead Amazon's frontier model research team within the AGI unit.