Adobe's board has named Anil Chakravarthy — the executive who guided Informatica through a private-equity buyout and grew its subscription revenue to more than $1 billion in annual recurring contracts — as the company's next president and chief executive officer, effective December 1, 2026. Adobe announced Chakravarthy's appointment on September 3, 2026. For the more than 35 million subscribers whose Photoshop plans, Creative Cloud pricing and access to AI features will depend on his decisions, the appointment signals that Adobe's board wanted an executive experienced in transforming a legacy enterprise-data company into a cloud subscription leader — a systems-transformation architect rather than a creative visionary.

Shantanu Narayen, who has led Adobe for 18 years and oversaw the subscription shift that turned the company from a perpetual-license software seller into one of the world's largest SaaS businesses, will become executive chair. The transition was announced on September 3, 2026, the same evening that David Wadhwani — president of Adobe's creativity and productivity business, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and the core Creative Cloud franchise — said on LinkedIn that he planned to leave the company after handing over his responsibilities.

The dual development — one insider rising and another executive departing — means Chakravarthy will take over a company that needs a new chief financial officer, with an interim CFO in place since Dan Durn left for Marvell Technologies in June, as well as a new head of its largest revenue segment. He will also face the central question investors have been asking for three years: can Adobe monetise AI faster than AI commoditises the work that its subscribers pay monthly to perform?

Who is Anil Chakravarthy, and why did Adobe's board choose him?

Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as executive vice president and general manager of its Digital Experience business. He took responsibility for worldwide field operations in September 2020, became president of Digital Experience in December 2021, and has led what Adobe now calls its Customer Experience Orchestration business — the enterprise suite covering Adobe Experience Platform, GenStudio, Brand Visibility and CX Enterprise Coworker.

The reason that background matters lies in Chakravarthy's previous role. Before joining Adobe, he was chief executive of Informatica, the enterprise cloud-data management company, from 2016 to 2020. He joined Informatica in 2013 as executive vice president and chief product officer and became CEO in 2016 after the company was acquired for $5.3 billion by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. During his tenure, Informatica shifted from perpetual-license enterprise software to a cloud and subscription model. By the time Chakravarthy left, its subscription annual recurring revenue had grown substantially for several years and exceeded $1 billion.

That pattern — a perpetual-license company making a large-scale structural shift to subscriptions, cloud services and consumption-based products — mirrors the challenge now facing Adobe. Under Narayen, Adobe moved from perpetual licences to per-seat subscriptions. The next step is from per-seat subscriptions to consumption-based agentic AI revenue, in which users are charged for what AI agents do on their behalf rather than simply for a software seat.

"I'm energised by the opportunity to fuel growth and drive Adobe's leadership in the next era of agentic software for creativity, productivity and customer experience," Chakravarthy said in the official appointment statement. Adobe has used "agentic software" in investor communications and product marketing throughout 2026 to describe an architecture in which AI agents, rather than users, perform creative and marketing tasks.

Before Informatica, Chakravarthy spent nearly a decade at Symantec in information security, endpoint protection and encryption roles. He also held executive positions at VeriSign and began his career as an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company's Silicon Valley business technology practice. He holds a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi (IIT-BHU), as well as a master's degree and doctorate from MIT.

Wadhwani's departure changes the succession picture

The CEO announcement did not come alone. Within hours of Adobe's release, Wadhwani said on LinkedIn that he would leave after transferring his responsibilities and intended to return to entrepreneurship. "As much as Adobe means a lot to me, I think now is the perfect time to start a new chapter, and Anil taking over as CEO is a great time for Adobe," Wadhwani wrote, according to reports citing the post.

Wadhwani led the product group that generates roughly three-quarters of Adobe's revenue — the creativity and productivity segment covering Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Acrobat, Adobe Express and the wider Creative Cloud ecosystem. Analysts had viewed him as a strong internal candidate for the CEO role, partly because of his involvement in Adobe's proposed $20 billion acquisition of Figma, which regulators blocked in December 2023. Jefferies analysts said after the Chakravarthy announcement that they had expected Wadhwani to become CEO and described his departure as a significant risk: "We believe more departures and org changes are likely."

Chakravarthy must now quickly fill the leadership gap in the division responsible for Creative Cloud while advancing his enterprise-focused agentic AI strategy.

What Adobe's share-price reaction signals

Investors were not uniformly reassured by the resolution of the leadership vacancy. ADBE shares fell about 2% in after-hours trading following the September 3 announcement, then extended losses to about 3.4% in pre-market trading on September 4 after Wadhwani's departure emerged.

The market reaction reflects a broader divide among analysts. Morgan Stanley has an Underweight rating and a $240 price target, citing the risk that AI-native tools will structurally weaken Creative Cloud's recurring subscription revenue, regardless of who leads Adobe. RBC Capital Markets takes the opposite view, maintaining an Outperform rating and a $315 target on confidence in Adobe's AI monetisation progress. Barclays kept its Equalweight rating but raised its target from $250 to $295.

ADBE fell about 25% in 2024, another 21% in 2025 and approximately 18% in 2026 before the announcement. Its 52-week high of $370.86 is now well above current trading levels. Adobe will report its third-quarter FY2026 results on September 10 — the first earnings call under the succession backdrop and Chakravarthy's first opportunity to address analysts publicly as incoming CEO.

What Firefly's architecture means for the agentic transition

Chakravarthy's focus on agentic software rests on a technical foundation that distinguishes Adobe from competitors and supports the transition strategy.

Firefly, Adobe's generative AI platform, was trained exclusively on licensed Adobe Stock content, openly licensed material and public-domain works rather than scraped web images. That approach allows Adobe to offer creative subscribers contractual intellectual-property indemnification for commercial use of Firefly outputs — a protection that Midjourney, OpenAI's image-generation tools and Stability AI do not currently match. For enterprise procurement teams in regulated industries, that legal protection is a direct monetisation driver. Adobe's AI-first annual recurring revenue exceeded $500 million in the second quarter of FY2026 and tripled year on year, showing that Firefly is generating material recurring subscription revenue at scale rather than merely producing usage statistics.

The next layer is Adobe Experience Platform and its agentic extensions, particularly CX Enterprise Coworker, which Adobe markets as capable of executing multi-step marketing and campaign tasks autonomously. This is the infrastructure Chakravarthy oversaw during his six years at Adobe and the platform he is now being asked to extend into the consumer creative market. Whether enterprise-oriented infrastructure can translate effectively into creative workflows for individual Photoshop and Illustrator users remains the key unanswered product question.

Adobe's competitive position at the handover

Chakravarthy inherits competitive pressure that has intensified since Adobe's failed Figma acquisition in December 2023. Figma, the browser-based design platform Adobe sought to buy for $20 billion before regulators blocked the deal, has continued to build market share independently. In the first quarter of 2026, Figma reported revenue of $333.4 million, up 46% year on year, and launched a native AI design agent that can generate and edit designs through natural-language prompts. Canva, the Australia-based design platform popular with small businesses and individual creators, reported approximately $4 billion in annualised recurring revenue by early 2026 and has expanded its AI capabilities through the acquisitions of Leonardo AI and Affinity.

Adobe has responded by embedding Firefly-powered features across Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and Creative Cloud, while pursuing a Creative Cloud freemium strategy that offers basic features free to attract users who may later convert to paid subscriptions. The freemium expansion, confirmed in Adobe's second-quarter earnings release, is deliberately restraining near-term annual recurring revenue growth in exchange for a future conversion benefit whose rate Adobe has not publicly disclosed.

What Chakravarthy inherits on regulation

Alongside the AI competition, Chakravarthy takes over a company facing unresolved regulatory issues. Adobe agreed in March 2026 to a $150 million settlement with the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission over a June 2024 lawsuit that accused the company of trapping customers in subscriptions through hidden early-termination fees and difficult cancellation procedures. The settlement is still awaiting court approval. Under its terms, $75 million will go to the US government as civil penalties and $75 million will be provided to affected customers through free services. Adobe has said it will proactively contact affected customers once the court filings are accepted.

Adobe also co-founded and continues to lead the Content Authenticity Initiative, a coalition of more than 3,000 companies including Canon, the Associated Press, Nvidia and Getty Images. The group develops the Content Credentials standard, described as a "nutrition label for digital content", which provides provenance information showing when and how an image was created or modified. The policy role, which Chakravarthy oversaw through his enterprise and field-operations responsibilities, is directly relevant to technology companies and advertisers.

Narayen's 18-year record — and the legacy he leaves

Narayen's tenure will be studied as a case of legacy-software transformation. He became CEO in 2007 and turned Adobe into a subscription powerhouse. The Creative Cloud transition, announced in 2012 and largely completed by 2015, is now taught in business schools as a model for managing disruption. Adobe's revenue grew from roughly $3 billion when Narayen became CEO to $6.62 billion in a single quarter this year.

The burden Narayen leaves behind is a share price that has lost roughly half its value from its peak even as the underlying business continued to grow. The gap between operating performance and market valuation reflects uncertainty over whether Adobe can complete its next transition before AI-native competitors establish themselves across the market. That is the challenge Chakravarthy was chosen to address.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Anil Chakravarthy's Informatica background mean for Creative Cloud subscribers?

Chakravarthy's defining achievement was converting Informatica, a legacy enterprise-software company, from perpetual licences to a cloud subscription model and growing recurring revenue to more than $1 billion during his tenure. Adobe's board appears to have selected him because the company needs to make a similar transition: from per-seat Creative Cloud subscriptions to consumption-based agentic AI revenue, in which users pay for what AI agents accomplish rather than for a software seat. For subscribers, that could mean faster investment in Adobe's AI products and a possible shift from flat monthly fees towards usage-based tiers over the next two to three years.

Why did David Wadhwani leave Adobe on the same day Chakravarthy was named CEO?

Wadhwani led Adobe's creativity and productivity business, responsible for Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom and the core Creative Cloud suite, and had been considered by several analysts to be a leading internal CEO candidate. After Chakravarthy was selected, Wadhwani said on LinkedIn that he would leave the company to pursue entrepreneurship. Jefferies analysts warned that his exit made "more departures and org changes likely". His departure means Chakravarthy must immediately fill the top leadership position in Adobe's largest revenue-generating segment before becoming CEO in December.

What is Adobe's "agentic software" strategy, and what does it mean for users?

"Agentic software" is the term Chakravarthy used in his appointment statement to describe Adobe's AI direction. Agentic AI systems are designed to pursue goals and execute multi-step tasks autonomously — not merely generate an image from a text prompt, but plan and execute a campaign workflow from brief to published asset without step-by-step user input. Adobe's current agentic products include CX Enterprise Coworker for enterprise marketing teams and AI capabilities embedded in Photoshop, GenStudio and Adobe Experience Platform. For individual Creative Cloud subscribers, agentic features are expected to appear gradually through tools that automate repetitive editing, draft layout variations and manage version control, although Adobe has not formally announced their timetable or pricing model.

What happens next for Adobe subscribers and investors before Chakravarthy starts on December 1?

Adobe will report its third-quarter FY2026 results on September 10, 2026, one week away. The results call will be Chakravarthy's first opportunity to speak directly to analysts in his capacity as incoming CEO. Key metrics will include net new Digital Media annual recurring revenue, the clearest signal of whether Creative Cloud subscriptions are expanding or contracting; AI-first annual recurring revenue growth, which measures Firefly monetisation; and any update on the freemium conversion rate. Court approval of the FTC settlement and the search for a permanent CFO are separate governance issues that could also arise during the call.

Originally published on Tech Times