Adobe Names 7-Year Insider Anil Chakravarthy as Next CEO, Replacing Shantanu Narayen Dec. 1

Adobe's board announced Thursday, September 3, that Anil Chakravarthy will become the company's next president and CEO, effective December 1, 2026. He succeeds Shantanu Narayen, who has run Adobe since 2007 and announced back in March he would step down once a successor was named.

Narayen isn't leaving. He's moving to executive chair and will work with Chakravarthy through the transition, according to Adobe's announcement. Chakravarthy will also join the board.

Frank Calderoni, Adobe's lead independent director, led the special committee that ran the search. He said the board unanimously concluded Chakravarthy was "the right leader for Adobe's next chapter of growth," pointing to his six-and-a-half-year track record building the Customer Experience Orchestration business, according to NDTV Profit and Business Standard.

Who is Chakravarthy

Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as executive vice president running the Digital Experience business, picked up worldwide field operations later that year, and was promoted to president of Digital Experience and field operations in December 2021. He most recently ran Customer Experience Orchestration.

Before Adobe, he spent four years as CEO of Informatica, the cloud data management firm, and before that held executive roles at Symantec, VeriSign and McKinsey & Company, according to CNBC and India Today. He holds a bachelor's in computer science from IIT (BHU) Varanasi and a master's and PhD from MIT. He also sits on the board of FIS.

In a LinkedIn post reported by India Today, Chakravarthy said he's focused on Adobe's push into "agentic software for creativity, productivity and customer experience."

The AI problem Adobe hasn't solved

Adobe stock lost 25% in 2024, another 21% in 2025, and is down about 18% so far in 2026, according to CNBC. Shares fell roughly 1.7% to 2% in after-hours trading Thursday on the CEO news, per CNBC and Reuters (carried by WTVB-AM).

Investors have raised concerns about generative AI tools that now let anyone create images, video and design work with a text prompt. Rivals like Canva and Figma are eating into territory Adobe used to own outright, worrying shareholders watching a two-year stock decline.

Adobe's response is to point to its own numbers. The company raised its annual profit forecast in June, citing rising demand for its AI tools, according to Reuters. Whether that forecast bump is enough to reverse two years of stock losses is something analysts remain split on, with some staying skeptical about AI's longer-term effect on Adobe's business, per India Today and Firstpost.

Wadhwani's exit, and an echo of the Figma deal

The CEO announcement came bundled with news that David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's creativity and productivity business, is leaving the company after five years. CNBC had previously reported Wadhwani was seen as a strong internal contender for the top job, partly because of his role steering Adobe's attempted acquisition of Figma, a deal the companies scrapped in 2023 after regulators objected.

Wadhwani said on LinkedIn he's got a few company ideas he wants to "explore and pressure-test" and called it "the right moment" for both himself and Adobe.

Reuters, in a report carried by WTVB-AM, added a detail most other outlets skipped: Adobe's chief financial officer, Dan Durn, also departed the company in June, and no permanent CFO replacement has been named. This leaves Adobe managing a CEO handoff and a CFO vacancy at the same time it's trying to convince Wall Street its AI strategy is working.

What's next

Adobe is scheduled to hold its Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings call on September 10, according to NDTV Profit, one week after the leadership announcement. That call will be the first real test of whether the June profit-forecast increase was a turning point or a blip, and whether investors buy Chakravarthy's pitch on agentic AI before he officially takes over on December 1.