Adobe is handing the CEO job to Anil Chakravarthy, ending Shantanu Narayen’s run atop the company after nearly 15 years and putting someone else in charge of Adobe’s fight to stay relevant as AI tools reshape creative software.
The company’s board announced the move, with Chakravarthy taking over as president and CEO on December 1 and joining the board at the same time. Narayen will move into the role of executive chair, staying on to help with the handoff rather than leaving the company outright.
Who’s taking over
Chakravarthy has spent about six and a half years at Adobe, most recently building out the company’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and running its worldwide field operations. That’s the part of Adobe selling marketing and data tools to big brands, not the Photoshop-and-Premiere side most people associate with the name, which suggests the board is betting on someone who understands enterprise sales as much as creative software.
Narayen took over as CEO in 2007 and is credited with pushing Adobe from a boxed-software company into the subscription model that now generates most of its revenue. That same subscription bet is under new pressure: AI image and video generators have made it easier than ever to skip Adobe’s tools entirely, and the company has spent the past two years trying to bolt its own AI features onto Photoshop, Premiere, and Firefly to keep customers from wandering off.
Why the timing matters
Handing the reins to an executive from the enterprise side, rather than someone from Adobe’s creative product lines, signals where the board thinks the next fight will be won or lost: not in convincing individual designers to stick around, but in locking down the corporate contracts that pay Adobe’s bills. Whether Chakravarthy can also make Adobe’s AI tools feel essential rather than tacked-on is the harder question, and it’s the one that will define whether this transition looks smooth in hindsight or overdue.
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Sources: CNBC · Bloomberg · Adobe Newsroom
