Adobe Names Anil Chakravarthy CEO As Shantanu Narayen Becomes Executive Chair

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Adobe's board named Anil Chakravarthy as president and chief executive officer on 3 September. He takes the role and joins the board on 1 December, succeeding Shantanu Narayen, who moves to executive chair after 18 years as chief executive.

Chakravarthy currently runs Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations. He joined in January 2020 as executive vice president and general manager of the digital experience business, added responsibility for worldwide field operations in September that year, and was promoted to president in December 2021. Before Adobe he spent four years as chief executive of Informatica, the enterprise data management company. He is an MIT graduate.

Narayen announced in March that he would step down once a successor was appointed. Frank Calderoni, Adobe's lead independent director, chaired a special committee that considered both internal and external candidates, and said the board determined unanimously that Chakravarthy was the right choice.

Chakravarthy said he was honoured to lead the company at a pivotal moment, and pointed to what he called the next era of agentic software.

The appointment lands during a difficult stretch for the share price. Adobe stock has fallen around 18 per cent this year after declining more than 21 per cent in 2025, alongside other software companies investors consider exposed to AI disruption. The company raised its annual profit forecast in June on demand for its AI products, though some analysts remain sceptical about how well it can hold off challengers including Figma and Canva.

Adobe also announced the departure of chief financial officer Dan Durn in June. A permanent successor has not been named.

The choice of candidate says more than the fact of a change.

Chakravarthy runs the enterprise side of Adobe: customer experience orchestration, the marketing and data software assembled over years of acquisitions, plus worldwide field operations. He has never run Creative Cloud. Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro sit outside his remit.

Creative Cloud is the franchise under attack. It is the business investors worry generative tools will commoditise, and the one Figma and Canva are pressing hardest. A board looking at that threat has just handed the company to the executive who runs the part of it that is not under threat.

Read as a strategic statement, that is coherent. It suggests Adobe's answer to AI disruption is not to defend design tools more vigorously but to shift the centre of gravity towards enterprise workflow, data and customer experience, where switching costs are higher and the buyer is a procurement committee rather than an individual designer.

His background points the same way. Four years running Informatica is an enterprise data pedigree, not a creative software one, and his own framing of the job invokes agentic software rather than design.

The less flattering reading is that the board picked the executive whose numbers held up. Both can be true at once.

The reflex in India will be to file this as another Indian-origin chief executive at a large American technology company. That framing is worth resisting here, because Adobe is replacing one Indian-origin chief executive with another. Narayen has held the job since 2007. Whatever milestone this represents, Adobe passed it nineteen years ago.

The more useful question is what the pattern actually measures.

Adobe, Microsoft, Google, IBM and others are run by people educated in India who built their careers elsewhere. That is a statement about where Indian operating talent gets deployed, not about where it gets created. It confirms that India produces exceptional operators. It says nothing about India producing companies at that scale.

Set it alongside the rest of this week. Ford's India centre is hiring specialists. TCS has taken over Best Buy's Bengaluru captive. AMD is training ten thousand Delhi University students on its GPU stack. In each case India supplies capability to a company headquartered somewhere else. A chief executive appointment in San Jose is the most visible version of that same arrangement, not a departure from it.

The number that would actually change the picture is not how many Indian-origin executives run American firms. It is how many companies of Adobe's scale get built and headquartered here. India took 1 per cent of global venture funding value in the first seven months of this year, and its chip-design startups have raised $162 million in total since 2023.

None of which makes the appointment unimportant to India. Executives in these seats decide where capability centres go, which markets receive product investment and which partnerships get signed, and Narayen's tenure coincided with Adobe building substantial Indian operations. That influence is genuine.

It is simply a different thing from building the company. Celebrating the first while measuring progress by it is how a country talks itself out of attempting the second.

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