Anil Chakravarthy takes Adobe’s CEO chair as Shantanu Narayen steps back

After more than 18 years at the helm, Shantanu Narayen is preparing to hand over Adobe’s corner office.

The company has named Anil Chakravarthy as its next President and CEO, effective December 1, 2026. Narayen will move into the role of executive chair, remaining closely involved as Adobe navigates what may be the most consequential technological shift of his tenure. 

For an Indian technology community that has watched Narayen become one of the most prominent Indian-origin leaders in global technology, there is also a certain continuity in the appointment. Chakravarthy, like Narayen, is an Indian-origin technology executive with deep experience in enterprise software. He holds a computer science degree from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, and a master’s degree and PhD from MIT. 

More importantly, he knows Adobe. Chakravarthy joined the company in 2020 to lead its Digital Experience business. He subsequently took responsibility for worldwide field operations and enterprise customers across Adobe’s portfolio, before becoming president of Digital Experience and worldwide field operations. In his current role, he leads Customer Experience Orchestration and global field operations. 

That experience matters because Adobe’s next challenge is less about protecting what it built and more about redefining what its products become.

For decades, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and InDesign have occupied enviable positions in the creative economy. Adobe built a formidable subscription business around professionals who needed increasingly sophisticated tools. But generative AI has begun to change the economics and mechanics of creation itself.

Figma, Canva, and a growing collection of AI-native tools are making design increasingly accessible, while generative systems can produce images, layouts, video, and other creative assets with dramatically less technical expertise. 

That creates an uncomfortable question for Adobe: what happens when the tools that made professional creativity valuable also make creativity easier to automate?

Adobe has spent the past several years trying to answer that question. Chakravarthy has been involved in scaling AI-powered offerings including GenStudio and Adobe CX Enterprise, as well as the Adobe Experience Platform. His background therefore fits the company’s current direction unusually well. 

There is also a financial reason behind this. Adobe’s shares have fallen roughly 18% this year, following a decline of more than 21% in 2025, as investors have worried about AI disrupting the company’s traditional software businesses. Adobe has continued to report demand for its AI-powered products and raised its annual profit forecast in June, but the market clearly wants evidence that the company can turn AI from a threat into a growth engine. 

The leadership transition, therefore, is carefully constructed. Narayen announced in March that he intended to step down once a successor had been found. The board subsequently began a formal search before settling on Chakravarthy. 

Keeping Narayen as executive chair also gives Adobe something valuable: continuity during uncertainty.

There is, however, a wrinkle. David Wadhwani, who led Adobe’s Creativity and Productivity businesses and was widely viewed as another potential successor, is leaving the company. That makes Chakravarthy’s appointment feel more consequential, particularly as Adobe reshapes its leadership around the AI era. 

Narayen leaves the CEO role with an extraordinary legacy. He helped transform Adobe from a company known primarily for boxed creative software into one of the world’s major subscription and cloud businesses.

Chakravarthy inherits the harder assignment: making sure Adobe remains indispensable when software itself is becoming increasingly intelligent.

His biggest test may therefore be deceptively simple. Can Adobe persuade customers that AI will make its ecosystem more valuable, rather than make the ecosystem less necessary? That is the question that will define Adobe’s next chapter.