Adobe said this week that Anil Chakravarthy, the executive who has run its digital-experience and customer-facing businesses since 2020, will become president and chief executive on Dec. 1, ending Shantanu Narayen's 18-year run atop the design and creative-software giant. Narayen, who has led Adobe since December 2007, will move into a newly created executive chair role, working alongside Chakravarthy through the handoff and remaining on the company's board.
The change was announced in a company release that credited Narayen with growing Adobe's annual revenue from roughly $3 billion to more than $25 billion over his tenure, a period that took the company from a boxed-software seller through its shift to cloud subscriptions and, more recently, into an aggressive push to embed generative AI across its Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud product lines. Narayen first signaled his intention to step aside in a March 2026 announcement, which said he would remain CEO only until a successor was named and ready.
Who is Anil Chakravarthy
Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as an executive vice president overseeing its digital-experience business, took on responsibility for worldwide field operations later that year, and was promoted to president of digital experience and field operations in December 2021 — the perch from which he now moves into the top job. Before Adobe, he spent seven years at Informatica, joining as chief product officer in 2013 and serving as chief executive from 2015 to 2020, where he is credited with steering the data-management company through a shift to cloud and subscription revenue not unlike the one Adobe itself underwent. Earlier in his career he held senior roles at Symantec and VeriSign and worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company; he holds a bachelor's degree from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, and a master's and doctorate from MIT, according to CNBC's reporting on the appointment.
Adobe's board framed the choice as continuity rather than a change in direction: Chakravarthy has been a member of the executive team steering Adobe's response to the rapid rise of AI-native design tools from smaller rivals, a competitive threat that has weighed on the stock even as the company's underlying subscription revenue has kept growing.
A leadership test amid AI competition
The succession lands at a pressure point for Adobe. Firefly, the company's generative AI suite, and AI features layered into Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Acrobat have been central to its pitch that it can out-innovate leaner AI-first startups rather than be disrupted by them. Wall Street's reaction to the announcement was muted, reflecting both the orderly nature of the transition — flagged six months in advance — and lingering investor questions about how aggressively Adobe can defend its creative-software franchise as rivals ship AI image and video tools directly to consumers.
Chakravarthy inherits a company that remains highly profitable and dominant in professional creative software but that has had to defend its pricing power and subscription model as AI lowers the cost of entry for amateur and semi-professional content creation. Analysts covering the company have said his background turning around Informatica's business model gives him direct experience managing a similar transition, though Adobe's brand and market position are considerably stronger than Informatica's were at the time.
Narayen said in the announcement that he plans to spend the transition period working closely with Chakravarthy on strategy and major customer relationships. Adobe did not indicate any planned changes to its dividend, buyback program or overall corporate strategy as a result of the leadership change, and executives are expected to address the transition in more detail on the company's next quarterly earnings call.
