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Amazon AI chief Rohit Prasad exits as Andy Jassy redraws the company’s AI map
SEATTLE: Amazon is shaking up its artificial intelligence leadership just as the race for scale intensifies. Rohit Prasad, the company’s AI chief and a key architect of Alexa, will leave at the end of the year, triggering a sweeping reorganisation of Amazon’s generative AI ambitions.
In a blog post, chief executive Andy Jassy said Amazon is consolidating its biggest bets generative AI models, custom silicon and quantum computing into a single new organisation. The unit will be led by Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran who currently serves as a senior vice-president in the cloud business.
Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 during Alexa’s formative years and helped turn it from an ambitious experiment into a conversational AI service used by hundreds of millions of customers. Jassy credited him with building a strong team, differentiated technology and growing customer momentum, calling his leadership missionary, passionate and selfless.
The restructuring signals Amazon’s view that it has reached an inflection point. New technologies including proprietary AI models such as Nova, chips such as Graviton, Trainium and Nitro, and longer-term quantum bets are now central to the company’s future customer experience. Bringing them under one roof, Jassy argued, will help Amazon decide where these fast-growing businesses are best placed to maximise long-term value.
The move comes amid Amazon’s broader expansion push, including a $35bn investment plan in India aimed at accelerating digital transformation.
For Amazon, the message is unmistakable. The AI race is no longer about side projects and internal silos. It is about speed, scale and control. Prasad’s exit closes one chapter. The next will be louder, faster and far more consequential.
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YES Bank appoints S Anantharaman as chief risk officer
Former Jio Financial Services group chief risk officer takes charge of enterprise-wide risk at the embattled private lender
MUMBAI: YES Bank is not taking chances with risk anymore. The private lender has appointed S Anantharaman as its chief risk officer, a hire that signals the bank’s continued effort to rebuild credibility and tighten the controls that once famously slipped.
Anantharaman arrives from Jio Financial Services, where he served as group chief risk officer and built a risk management architecture spanning lending, payments, insurance broking and asset management from the ground up. Before that, he held the chief risk officer role at Bank of Baroda and senior leadership positions at HDFC Bank and L&T Finance Holdings. Three decades in banking and financial services, in other words, with scars and qualifications to match. He is a chartered accountant and a CFA charterholder.
At YES Bank, his brief is considerable. Anantharaman will oversee the bank’s entire enterprise-wide risk framework, covering credit policy, market risk, operational risk, information security, data governance, analytics, model governance and data privacy. It is, in short, every lever that matters when a bank is trying to prove it has grown up.
YES Bank’s turbulent past needs little rehearsing. What it needs now is exactly what Anantharaman has spent thirty years building: the kind of risk culture that stops problems before they become headlines. The appointment suggests the bank knows it.
