Hyundai Commits to 50,000 Robots as Boston Dynamics Chases Scale

Hyundai has committed to roughly 50,000 robot deployments across Hyundai Motor and Kia facilities — a volume guarantee Boston Dynamics' former interim CEO calls "planning certainty" and "cost target certainty" for its humanoid ambitions.

Amanda McMaster, Boston Dynamics' CFO for six years, ran the company as interim CEO from February until Rohit Prasad took the helm Oct. 7. Speaking with Fortune's Ellie Austin at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit last week, she framed the company's shift bluntly: viral robot videos are no longer a sales strategy.

"Inbound demand at some point dries up," McMaster said. "You need a proactive sales motion."

What does the robot business actually look like today?

The commercial workhorse is Spot, the four-legged robot priced at about $100,000 for the base platform and up to $300,000 depending on payloads. That's a six-figure capital purchase per unit — closer to industrial equipment than consumer gadget.

Spot conducts inspections and equipment readings in semiconductor manufacturing, food and beverage production, and public safety. Intel is one of Boston Dynamics' largest Spot customers. Through the Orbit software platform, customers can search their facilities "almost like a Google Street View," McMaster said.

She pushes back on the labor-replacement narrative. Robots take on "dull, dirty, dangerous work," augmenting human labor rather than substituting for it. Workers, she noted, are even naming the robots.

How does Boston Dynamics plan to make Atlas affordable?

Atlas, the humanoid, is the harder test: can the company manufacture advanced machines at scale while driving costs down? McMaster's playbook is short: "Control your cost and then get to scale fast."

The unit economics hinge on one component family. Roughly 70% of an Atlas robot's bill of materials is actuators — the components that enable movement. Hyundai Mobis will produce them at cost, McMaster said, which turns the single largest cost line into a fixed, parent-subsidized input.

Layer the 50,000-deployment Hyundai commitment on top, and Boston Dynamics gets what most robotics startups lack: guaranteed volume plus a known cost floor. What does this change for buyers and rivals? It signals Atlas pricing could land far below typical humanoid prototypes, backed by an industrial parent rather than venture runway.

What did McMaster change as interim CEO?

About two weeks into the interim role, she reorganized the entire company. "We have been very slow to make it," she said of the restructuring decision. Her approach: "Rip the Band-Aid off."

Earlier in the commercial journey, she helped build Boston Dynamics' operational systems, sales leadership and the service infrastructure customers need to extract value from robots — the unglamorous machinery behind the demo reels.

McMaster said the CFO role "was my dream job," but the interim assignment "opened my eyes to what I'm capable of." The board gave her a say in the final CEO candidates. Of Prasad — a former Amazon SVP and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence — she said he is "going to be phenomenal."

Prasad inherits deep robotics expertise, an industrial parent and a growing commercial foundation. His challenge: pairing that foundation with advanced AI to build machines that work reliably in the real world.