Adobe has named Anil Chakravarthy as its next President and Chief Executive Officer, marking a major leadership transition at one of the world’s largest creative and marketing technology companies.
Chakravarthy will assume the role on December 1, 2026, and join Adobe’s Board of Directors. Long-time CEO Shantanu Narayen will transition to the role of Executive Chair and work closely with Chakravarthy through the transition.
The appointment puts an executive with deep experience across customer experience, enterprise software, data and marketing technology at the helm of Adobe at a critical point in its evolution.
Chakravarthy currently serves as President of Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and oversees worldwide field operations, including enterprise sales, professional services and customer success.
He joined Adobe in January 2020 to lead its Digital Experience business and has since emerged as one of the key executives shaping the company’s enterprise and customer experience strategy.
Under his leadership, Adobe has expanded its focus on Customer Experience Orchestration, bringing together customer data, content, journeys and artificial intelligence to help businesses deliver personalised experiences at scale.
His appointment is particularly significant as Adobe attempts to position itself for the next phase of AI-driven software.
In announcing his appointment, Chakravarthy said he sees an opportunity to drive Adobe’s leadership in the next era of agentic software across creativity, productivity and customer experience.
The challenge ahead, however, is substantial.
Generative AI has rapidly altered the competitive environment around Adobe. AI-native creative tools and increasingly capable models are changing how images, videos, advertisements and marketing content are produced, while established and emerging software companies are competing for a larger share of creative workflows.
Adobe has responded by embedding generative and agentic AI across both its creative products and enterprise marketing technology portfolio.
On the enterprise side, Chakravarthy has been central to that strategy.
Adobe has increasingly positioned Customer Experience Orchestration as a major opportunity, bringing together customer data, content creation, personalisation, measurement and AI-powered decision-making.
The scale of that business is becoming increasingly important to Adobe’s overall growth story.
In its second quarter of FY2026, Adobe reported Creative & Marketing Professionals subscription revenue of $4.54 billion, representing 13 per cent year-on-year growth, or 11 per cent in constant currency.
During the company’s Q2 earnings commentary, Chakravarthy described AI as a tailwind for Adobe’s enterprise business and highlighted three areas at the centre of its AI-first strategy: Adobe Experience Platform and its native applications for customer engagement; Adobe GenStudio for the content supply chain; and Adobe Experience Manager and agentic web applications for brand visibility.
His elevation therefore represents continuity at Adobe, but also puts an executive who has spent years building its enterprise customer experience and marketing technology operations at the centre of its next leadership chapter.
Before joining Adobe, Chakravarthy served as CEO of enterprise cloud data management company Informatica from 2015 to 2020. He had joined Informatica in 2013 as Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer and helped lead the company’s transition towards cloud and subscription services.
Earlier in his career, Chakravarthy held several senior leadership roles at Symantec and worked at VeriSign. He began his career at McKinsey & Company.
He holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chakravarthy succeeds one of the technology industry’s longest-serving chief executives.
Narayen became Adobe CEO in 2007 after joining the company in 1998. His tenure saw Adobe undergo one of the software industry’s most significant business-model transformations, moving its flagship creative products from packaged software towards cloud-based subscriptions.
Adobe also expanded substantially beyond its traditional creative software business during his tenure, building businesses spanning digital documents, customer experience, marketing technology, analytics and artificial intelligence.
Narayen will remain closely involved with the company as Executive Chair.
Adobe said its Board unanimously selected Chakravarthy following a search process overseen by a special committee. The company had announced earlier in 2026 that Narayen would transition from the CEO role once a successor was identified.
The transition comes at a consequential moment for Adobe.
The company’s previous defining transformation was its move from packaged software to subscriptions and the cloud. Its next challenge is AI.
For Chakravarthy, the task will be to show that Adobe can not only protect its established creative software businesses as AI reshapes content creation, but also capture the larger enterprise opportunity emerging around AI-powered marketing, customer data, content supply chains and customer experience.
His background running Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business makes that mandate particularly significant for the MarTech industry.
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