Adobe replaces CEO with customer experience leader

What happened

Adobe has named Anil Chakravarthy as its next chief executive, ending a six-month succession process following Shantanu Narayen's announcement in March that he would step back from the role. Narayen remains with the company as chairman. Chakravarthy previously led Adobe's customer experience orchestration business, where he oversaw products including Adobe CX Enterprise, GenStudio, Brand Visibility and the CX Enterprise Coworker offering.

The appointment settles months of speculation that David Wadhwani, Adobe's president of creativity and productivity — the unit responsible for roughly three-quarters of company revenue — would take the top job. Having been passed over, Wadhwani has announced his departure from Adobe on LinkedIn.

Why it matters

The choice signals where Adobe's board sees its future growth: not in the legacy creative-tools business that built the company, but in customer experience orchestration and AI-driven marketing technology. Elevating a CX leader over the executive running Adobe's largest revenue segment is a deliberate statement about strategic priorities at a company under pressure to prove its generative-AI story to investors.

For the wider market, it is a data point in a broader pattern: experience and orchestration capabilities are increasingly seen as the differentiator that determines a software vendor's next chapter, not just its content or creative tooling. Chakravarthy inherits a company whose share price has fallen sharply in recent years as rivals' generative-AI tools have raised questions about Adobe's competitive position — making this a leadership change with real strategic stakes attached.

By the numbers

• Six months elapsed between Narayen's March announcement and Chakravarthy's confirmation as CEO.
• Roughly three-quarters of Adobe's revenue comes from the digital media business that David Wadhwani led.

The Renascence take

Boardroom successions rarely double as strategy statements this clearly. By passing over the executive who ran Adobe's biggest revenue engine in favour of the leader who built its CX orchestration stack, Adobe's board is effectively betting that owning the customer journey matters more than owning the creative canvas.

Most coverage will frame this as a personnel story; the more interesting read is what it says about how software companies now compete. Creative tools and content generation are becoming table stakes, commoditised faster by AI than anyone expected — the orchestration layer that decides which content reaches which customer, when and how, is where the durable value and pricing power now sit. Any organisation still treating "experience" as a bolt-on function reporting into marketing should note that Adobe just put it in the chief executive's chair. The lesson for operators isn't to copy Adobe's org chart — it's to ask honestly whether their own leadership structure reflects where their customers' loyalty is actually being won or lost.