Who Is Alexa’s Key Architect Rohit Prasad - Set To Exit Amazon

Alexa architect Rohit Prasad is set to leave the company, closing a chapter in its decade long voice assistant journey.

Indian origin AI leader Rohit Prasad, best known as the driving force behind Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa, will step down from the company at the end of this year, CEO Andy Jassy has confirmed in a blog post.

Praising his contribution, Jassy said Prasad played a crucial role in transforming Alexa from a bold concept into a service used daily by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. He described Prasad as deeply committed, passionate and selfless, and thanked him for his leadership, technical foresight and the systems he helped build.

From Engineering Roots To Global Expertise

Prasad completed his undergraduate studies in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, before moving to the United States for higher education. He earned a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where his research focused on speech coding for wireless communication.

He later strengthened his leadership and business acumen by completing an Executive MBA programme at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

His Journey In AI And Speech Systems

Post Amazon, Rohit spent approximately 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies, known to be considerably a respected research organization. There he worked on cutting edge initiatives spanning speech recognition, language translation, text analytics and multimedia technologies, while also leading teams of scientists and engineers across both government and commercial projects.

From Alexa To Amazon

Rohit Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 and soon emerged as one of the central figures shaping the artificial intelligence that powers Alexa. Over the years, he steered research across key areas such as natural language understanding, conversational AI and dialogue systems, machine reasoning, and core machine learning platforms.

His work was instrumental in evolving Alexa from a basic voice assistant into a far more intuitive and intelligent conversational service now used by millions of people around the world.

Between 2016 and 2023, Prasad served first as Vice President and later as Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa AI, where he oversaw long-term research strategy and innovation.

In July 2023, he moved into his current role as Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon. In this position, he led work on Amazon’s foundation model family, Amazon Nova, with a focus on building next-generation AI systems capable of reasoning, understanding context and supporting a wide range of tasks.