Adobe Bets on Its Experience Cloud Chief as CEO

Adobe named Anil Chakravarthy, president of its customer-experience business and worldwide field operations, as president and chief executive effective December 1. Shantanu Narayen, chief executive since 2007, will become executive chair the same day and stay on the board through the handoff.

David Wadhwani, the president who ran Creative Cloud, Acrobat, and Firefly, said the same afternoon that he is leaving. The board did not give the job to the man who ran about three-quarters of the company.

Adobe Chose the Smaller of Its Two Businesses

The board named Chakravarthy president and CEO after a search that Frank Calderoni, the lead independent director, said was unanimous. Chakravarthy also joins the board on December 1. He has run Adobe’s Digital Experience line, later restyled Customer Experience Orchestration, and worldwide field operations that sell the whole catalog to large accounts.

That is a different wager than the one most holders had handicapped. Digital Media, the home of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, and Acrobat, still throws off most of the cash. Digital Experience is the marketing and analytics stack sold to brands. In fiscal 2025 the split was not close.

FY2025 REVENUE BY SEGMENT

Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies, titled his note “New ADBE CEO Not Who Many Expected” and wrote that Wadhwani had been “the rational choice given his running of three-fourths of Adobe’s revenue and respect inside and outside Adobe.” The board heard that argument and picked the other internal finalist anyway.

The Board has unanimously determined that Anil is the right leader for Adobe’s next chapter of growth. Over the last six and a half years, he has transformed and expanded Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations through innovation-led growth, developing and retaining talent and carrying forward Adobe’s culture and values.

Frank Calderoni, Lead Independent Director, Adobe statement

Narayen called him an experienced leader with “a deep knowledge of our business” and said he was the right person “to lead Adobe’s growth in an AI-driven era.” Chakravarthy’s own line was about “agentic software for creativity, productivity and customer experience,” which keeps all three franchises in the sentence. The org chart still tells you which franchise the new chief actually built.

David Wadhwani Leaves the Same Afternoon

Wadhwani had been president of the Creativity and Productivity business for nearly five years, his second tour at the company. He left in 2015 to run AppDynamics, which Cisco later bought for $3.7 billion, then came back in 2021. He sat in the chair through the attempt to buy Figma, a deal the companies dropped in 2023 after regulators objected, and through the launch of Firefly.

He posted on LinkedIn within hours of the board’s vote. He said he has a few company ideas he plans to “explore and pressure-test.”

As much as Adobe means to me, I’ve decided this is the right moment for me to start a new chapter, and it’s a great moment for Adobe to do the same as Anil steps into the CEO role.

David Wadhwani, President, Creativity and Productivity Business, LinkedIn

He added that he had worked alongside Chakravarthy “the last few years” and would leave “confident in where he’ll take Adobe.” Confidence is cheap on the way out the door. The practical problem is that the person who ran Photoshop, Acrobat, and the Firefly funnel will not be in the room when the new chief sets the fiscal 2027 plan.

Adobe had already redrawn the titles in January, months before the vote. Chakravarthy’s card switched from Digital Experience to Customer Experience Orchestration. Wadhwani’s switched from Digital Media to Creativity and Productivity. The language of the next era was already Chakravarthy’s. The board then made it official, and Wadhwani did not stay to report to him.

What Chakravarthy Built in Six Years

Chakravarthy is not a Creative Cloud lifer. He spent four years as chief executive of Informatica, the enterprise data company, after executive jobs at Symantec, VeriSign, and McKinsey. He holds a Bachelor of Technology in computer science and engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, and a master’s and Ph.D. from MIT.

CHAKRAVARTHY’S PATH TO THE JOB

1. January 2020: Joins Adobe as executive vice president and general manager of Digital Experience.
2. September 2020: Adds worldwide field operations, including enterprise sales and customer success across the full product set.
3. December 2021: Promoted to president of Digital Experience and worldwide field operations.
4. January 2026: Title becomes president of Customer Experience Orchestration as Adobe restyles the unit.
5. September 3, 2026: Board names him the next president and chief executive.
6. December 1, 2026: Becomes CEO and a director; Narayen becomes executive chair.

Field operations matter to the bet, because they gave him a view of Creative Cloud sold into companies, not only of marketing cloud licenses. The products that carry his name in the release are still the enterprise ones. He led Adobe Experience Platform, pushed GenStudio for the content supply chain, and backed Brand Visibility after the Semrush buy. He also shepherded Workfront into the stack.

THE PRODUCTS HE TAKES INTO THE CEO OFFICE

• Experience Platform: Adobe says AEP runs 70 billion profile activations and 35 trillion segment evaluations a day, and more than 1 trillion experiences a year.
• GenStudio: Ending ARR grew more than 25% year over year in the second quarter as brands standardized on one content supply chain.
• CX Enterprise: Launched with CX Enterprise Coworker at Adobe Summit as the agentic layer on top of the marketing suite.
• Brand Visibility: Pairs Experience Manager with Semrush search and generative-engine tools after the April deal.
• Agentic web trials: More than 1,500 customer trials were underway in Q2 for LLM Optimizer, Sites Optimizer, and Brand Concierge, and more than 80% of AEP and AEM customers were using agentic features already in the products.

On the June 11 earnings call he reported a $4.54 billion subscription quarter for Creative and Marketing Professionals, up 13% as reported, and said Customer Experience Orchestration AI-first ARR had grown 4 times year over year. Subscription revenue for AEP and its native apps grew more than 30%. Those are the numbers a marketing-cloud operator can take into a boardroom. They are also not Photoshop seats.

The Multiple Compressed While Revenue Kept Growing

Holders did not wait for December 1 to vote. Shares September 3 close of $285.75 rose 2.13% in the regular session, then slipped to $281.47, down 1.50%, after the announcement hit. The company’s market value sat at $113.59 billion. The 52-week range runs from $190.12 to $370.86.

ADBE ON THE DAY OF THE VOTE

• Regular close: $285.75, up 2.13% on September 3.
• After hours: $281.47, down 1.50% once the succession and Wadhwani’s exit were public.
• Year to date: down 18.35% in 2026 after a 21.29% drop in 2025 and a 25.46% drop in 2024.
• Market cap: $113.59 billion, with 397.50 million shares outstanding.

Revenue has not followed the stock down. Fiscal 2025 sales were $23.77 billion, up 11%. Second-quarter fiscal 2026 sales were $6.62 billion, up 13% as reported, with GAAP earnings of $4.25 a share and non-GAAP earnings of $5.96. Total ending ARR reached $27.10 billion, up 12.5%, and the company raised its fiscal 2026 sales target to $26.5 billion to $26.6 billion, including Semrush. The ARR growth target is still 10.2%, after management chose to chase free users and delay Creative Cloud price moves in the second half.

The discount is the AI argument in one chart. Canva, Figma, and a swarm of image and video models made Photoshop look optional to people who do not live in a studio. Adobe’s answer has been Firefly, Express, a Creative Agent that now sits inside ChatGPT and Claude, and a claim that commercially safe models will keep brands from wandering. Chakravarthy now owns that argument even though he did not build the apps at the center of it.

Firefly Still Has to Pay the Bills

Firefly ending ARR, counting the consumer app, credit packs, and the enterprise suite, was approaching $300 million at the end of the second quarter. Company-wide AI-first ARR was greater than $500 million, up 3 times year over year. Creative freemium monthly active users crossed 90 million, up from more than 50 million a year earlier, and Firefly ARR itself rose about 50% quarter over quarter after Adobe pushed personalized journeys and credit packs.

Those are real gains on a small base. A $27.10 billion ARR book does not re-rate because a generative overlay is approaching $300 million. The faster AI line in the same quarter was Chakravarthy’s: CXO AI-first ARR up 4 times, GenStudio up more than 25%, AEP apps up more than 30%. If the board wanted the person who has already turned AI into enterprise contracts, it went looking in the marketing cloud, not in the Firefly splash page.

The cost of that choice sits on the other side of the house. Wadhwani told investors in June that Creative Cloud “continues to perform well as the best-of-breed offering” and that Adobe was deferring planned second-half “line optimizations,” the usual phrase for price and packaging, to pour traffic into a free Firefly funnel. Narayen said the Creative Cloud business is “not where tweaking it is going to allow us to get the next hundreds of millions of customers.” Someone still has to run that funnel, keep the flagship apps ahead of Figma and Canva, and decide whether the free ride ever converts. That someone is no longer Wadhwani, and it has never been Chakravarthy’s day job.

The Finance Seat Is Already Empty

Daniel Durn, the chief financial officer, left on June 15 to become finance chief at Marvell. Steve Day, a 20-year Adobe finance executive who had been CFO of the Customer Experience Orchestration unit, is interim company CFO. The next earnings call is September 10, with Narayen still in the chair and Chakravarthy still in the CXO seat. Fiscal 2027 planning, the job Narayen said the next chief should stamp, starts with a new CEO, no permanent CFO, and no president of Creativity and Productivity.

Narayen’s March notice that he would step down after a successor was named closed an 18-year run that began in 2007, following his arrival in 1998. He turned boxed software into a subscription machine and made Photoshop a verb. The stock that machine produced has now fallen for two full years and most of a third, even as sales and ARR kept compounding in the low double digits. Chakravarthy inherits the compounding. He also inherits a creative bench with a hole in it, a finance seat on loan from his own former unit, and a market that will judge him on whether enterprise agents can replace the multiple that Firefly has not yet earned.

December 1 is a Tuesday. The Creative Cloud president will already be gone. The Experience Cloud operator will have the whole company.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Does Anil Chakravarthy Become Adobe CEO?

He becomes president and chief executive, and joins the board, on December 1, 2026, the same day Narayen becomes executive chair. The September 10 fiscal third-quarter call still falls in Narayen’s tenure, so the first full-year plan Chakravarthy owns is fiscal 2027, which Adobe’s fiscal calendar starts in late November.

Who Is Anil Chakravarthy?

He is a 2020 Adobe hire who previously spent four years as chief executive of Informatica and earlier worked at Symantec, VeriSign, and McKinsey. Adobe’s release credits him with CX Enterprise, GenStudio, Brand Visibility, the scaling of Experience Platform, and the integration of Workfront and Semrush, and it lists a computer-science degree from Varanasi plus a master’s and Ph.D. from MIT.

Why Did David Wadhwani Leave Adobe?

He said on LinkedIn that it was “the right moment” for a new chapter and that he plans to “explore and pressure-test” a few company ideas, and he wished Chakravarthy well. He had been one of two internal finalists, ran the unit that produced about 74% of fiscal 2025 revenue, and earlier left Adobe in 2015 to run AppDynamics before returning in 2021.

How Much of Adobe Comes From Experience Cloud Versus Creative Tools?

Digital Experience revenue was $5.86 billion in fiscal 2025, 25% of the $23.77 billion company, while Digital Media was $17.65 billion, or 74%. Digital Media ARR ended fiscal 2025 at $19.20 billion, and Digital Experience subscription revenue that year was $5.41 billion, up 11%.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of Adobe’s leadership change and related financial figures, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell ADBE or any other security, or a forecast of future returns. Readers should consult a qualified financial adviser or licensed broker before making investment decisions. Share prices, revenue figures, ARR, and executive roles reflect the company statements, filings, and market data cited here and can change with later earnings, filings, or trading.