Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has revealed a significant leadership reshuffle, with Rohit Prasad, the senior vice president heading the company’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) efforts, set to depart at the end of 2025. In his place, longtime AWS executive Peter DeSantis will lead a newly formed organisation focused on Amazon’s most advanced AI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing initiatives.
The changes, outlined in a company blog post, come shortly after the launch of Amazon’s Nova 2 models at the recent re:Invent conference and reflect an effort to streamline focus on emerging technologies.
Rohit Prasad’s journey at Amazon
Rohit Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 during the early development of Alexa, the company’s voice assistant. Over more than a decade, he played a pivotal role in transforming Alexa from an experimental project into a widely used service reaching hundreds of millions of customers worldwide.
In recent years, Prasad led the AGI organisation, overseeing the creation of the Amazon Nova family of foundation models. Under his leadership, the team developed twelve advanced models noted for strong price-performance, serving tens of thousands of businesses across various industries.
"Finally, I want to recognize Rohit Prasad, who has decided to leave Amazon at the end of this year...Rohit helped Alexa grow from an ambitious idea into a service that now touches hundreds of millions of customers' lives every day... Rohit has built a strong team, differentiated technology, growing customer momentum, and a culture of ambitious invention. He’s been missionary, passionate, and selfless, and I'm grateful for his leadership, his technical vision, and everything he's built here. Thank you, Rohit," Jassy said.
Amazon's new leadership structure
Peter DeSantis has been appointed to head a unified organisation responsible for Amazon’s expansive AI models (including the Nova suite and AGI team), custom chip development (such as Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro), and quantum computing projects. He will report directly to Andy Jassy.
Additionally, distinguished AI researcher Pieter Abbeel will lead the frontier model research team within AGI. Abbeel, who joined Amazon in 2024 following the company’s acquisition of robotics startup Covariant (which he co-founded), brings expertise in generative AI and reinforcement learning.
Jassy explained that the reorganisation aims to optimise resources across models, chips, and cloud infrastructure as these technologies mature.
