The man who will run Adobe starting December 1 has never shipped Photoshop. Anil Chakravarthy's résumé is enterprise data plumbing — four years running Informatica, executive stints at Symantec and VeriSign, a PhD from MIT — and inside Adobe he built the marketing-technology side of the house, not the creative side. On Thursday afternoon, September 3, Adobe's board handed him the whole company anyway.
Adobe said Chakravarthy, currently president of its Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations, will become president and chief executive and join the board effective December 1, 2026. Shantanu Narayen, CEO since 2007, becomes executive chair. Within hours, the more consequential half of the news landed: David Wadhwani, president of Adobe's Creativity and Productivity business and the internal favorite for the job, said he is leaving.
Investors read it as a rejection. Adobe shares fell roughly 6% to 7% on Friday, September 4. The stock had already dropped about 18% year-to-date through Thursday's close, after declining more than 20% in each of the two prior calendar years.
What Adobe actually announced
Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as executive vice president and general manager of the Digital Experience business, added worldwide field operations in September 2020, and was promoted to president of both in December 2021. Under him Adobe shipped Adobe CX Enterprise, GenStudio and Brand Visibility, scaled Adobe Experience Platform, and absorbed the Workfront and Semrush acquisitions. Before Adobe he spent four years as Informatica's CEO, having joined that company in 2013 as an executive vice president.
"Adobe's opportunity ahead is limitless with our track record in creating new market categories and world-class products. Anil is an experienced transformational leader who leads with values, integrity and a deep knowledge of our business," Narayen said in the announcement. Frank Calderoni, Adobe's lead independent director, who chaired the special committee overseeing the search, said the board "unanimously determined that Anil is the right leader for Adobe's next chapter of growth" after "a rigorous selection process."
Chakravarthy's own framing was notably un-creative in vocabulary: "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."
Wadhwani, who spent 19 years at Adobe across two stints and ran the business for nearly five years, wrote on LinkedIn: "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." He said he has "a few company ideas I'm eager to pursue."
He is not the first senior departure. CFO Dan Durn left in June. Jefferies analyst Brent Thill, who had called Wadhwani the logical pick because his business represented roughly three-quarters of Adobe's revenue, wrote that with Wadhwani gone, "we believe more departures and org changes are likely."
Why the enterprise guy won
The unglamorous answer is that Adobe stopped being two companies on paper. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, Adobe collapsed its former Digital Media, Digital Experience, and Publishing and Advertising segments into a single reportable segment, citing unified selling motions and integrated product innovation. That erased the structural line that had made "creative CEO versus enterprise CEO" a meaningful distinction on the income statement. The company now reports by customer type: in Q2 FY2026, Creative and Marketing Professionals subscription revenue grew 13% to $4.54 billion, while Business Professionals and Consumers grew 16% to $1.85 billion. Total revenue was a record $6.62 billion, up 13%, with ending ARR of $27.10 billion, up 12.5%.
Read that reorganization backward and the CEO choice looks less like a snub of the creative franchise than an admission about where the defensible revenue lives. Per-seat creative subscriptions are the part of Adobe most exposed to AI-native substitution — free and cheap image and video generators, plus Canva and Figma at the low and collaborative ends. Morgan Stanley made exactly that bet on Friday, downgrading Adobe to Underweight with a $240 price target on concerns that AI competition erodes Creative Cloud's recurring revenue. Barclays raised its target to $295 from $250 but kept an Equalweight rating; RBC Capital went to $315 from $285 with an Outperform.
Enterprise orchestration workloads — customer data, brand governance, campaign production at scale — are stickier, priced by consumption and contract rather than by seat, and sold through the field organization Chakravarthy already runs. That is the asset the board bought.
The monetization math argues the same way. Adobe's AI-first ARR crossed $500 million in Q2 FY2026 and tripled year over year, with Firefly's ending ARR across the app, credit packs and Firefly Enterprise exceeding $250 million. Real, growing, and still under 2% of a $27 billion base — while every generation served costs GPU time. Credit-pack pricing on a consumer app is a hard way to cover inference. A GenStudio contract is not.
What to watch
Adobe reports fiscal Q3 on September 10, six days after the selloff and Chakravarthy's first real test as CEO-designate. Three things matter: whether organic ARR guidance holds once the roughly $480 million of acquired Semrush ARR is stripped out; whether management names a permanent leader for the creativity and productivity business; and whether Firefly-direct ARR keeps tripling or starts to decelerate. Thill also expects board-level changes aimed at adding deeper AI expertise. Watch for that, and for who follows Wadhwani out the door before December 1.
“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, Adobe