Adobe once again gets an Indian-origin CEO: IIT BHU alumnus Anil Chakravarthy to succeed Shantanu Narayen

US-based Adobe has named Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, effective 1 December. He succeeds Shantanu Narayen, who has led the company since December 2007 and will become executive Chairman. Chakravarthy also joins Adobe's board. The appointment keeps Adobe's top job with an India-origin engineer. Narayen grew up in Hyderabad. Chakravarthy holds a BTech in computer science and engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, now IIT (BHU), and both a master's degree and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been at Adobe for six and a half years, most recently as president of its Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations. Frank Calderoni, Adobe's lead independent director, chaired the special committee that ran the search after Narayen announced in March that he would step down once a successor was found. The committee considered both internal and external candidates. "The Board has unanimously determined that Anil is the right leader for Adobe's next chapter of growth," said Frank Calderoni, lead independent director, Adobe. Calderoni said Chakravarthy had "transformed and expanded Adobe's Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations through innovation-led growth" over his time at the company. From Varanasi to San Jose Chakravarthy's route to the job was slower and more technical than the one usually associated with software CEOs. After Varanasi and MIT, he began his career at McKinsey & Company, where he eventually co-led the consulting firm's e-business practice in its Silicon Valley technology office. He moved to VeriSign, then spent close to a decade at Symantec in senior roles spanning information security, endpoint protection, encryption and data loss prevention. His responsibilities at Symantec at various points included the company's India product operations. His first CEO role came at Informatica, the enterprise cloud data management company. He joined in 2013 as executive vice president and chief product officer and became CEO in 2015, a position he held until 2020. What he did there is the clearest guide to why Adobe's board chose him. At Informatica he took over as acting CEO when a $5.3 billion buyout took the company private, and went on to shift its business from software licences towards cloud and subscription services. That is close to the transformation Narayen is best remembered for at Adobe, moving the company off boxed perpetual licences onto Creative Cloud subscriptions, a change that defined the following decade. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as executive vice president and general manager of the Digital Experience business. He took on worldwide field operations in September 2020, was promoted to president of Digital Experience and global field operations in December 2021, and most recently led the renamed Customer Experience Orchestration business alongside global sales, professional services and customer support. He sits on the board of FIS and has previously served on the boards of Ansys and USAA Bank. The part of Adobe he transformed Chakravarthy's work at Adobe has been in enterprise software rather than the creative tools the company is known for. Under his leadership the segment crossed $1 billion in quarterly revenue. He oversaw the acquisition and integration of Workfront, and more recently Semrush, and led the development of products including Adobe CX Enterprise, GenStudio and Brand Visibility, as well as scaling the Adobe Experience Platform. "I'm energized by the opportunity to fuel growth and drive Adobe's leadership in the next era of agentic software for creativity, productivity and customer experience," said Anil Chakravarthy, incoming president and CEO, Adobe. However, the job comes with pressure that the handover language does not convey. Adobe's shares have fallen around 18% in 2026, after declining more than 21% in 2025, as investors have marked down software companies they believe are exposed to disruption from AI. The competitive picture has shifted sharply. Figma, which Adobe tried to acquire for about $20 billion before abandoning the deal in late 2023 over regulatory objections in Europe and the United Kingdom, is now a listed rival. Canva has become the default design tool for millions of users, including who were never going to learn Photoshop. A steady stream of AI-native image and video tools now produce in one prompt what once took an afternoon. Adobe's response has been to build AI into its own products, and there is evidence of traction. The company raised its annual profit forecast in June, citing demand for its AI products, and has said its AI-first annual recurring revenue tripled year on year to more than $500 million. Indians at the top of global tech companies Notably, Chakravarthy joins a group of India-born or India-origin CEOs running some of the world's largest technology companies, including Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Arvind Krishna at IBM and Neal Mohan at YouTube. Adobe's case is unusual within that group because the handover is from one India-origin CEO to another. Narayen spent eighteen years turning Adobe from a boxed-software company into a subscription business. Chakravarthy takes over with a mandate to navigate the next transition.