Adobe Taps Business Product Chief as Next CEO

Adobe has chosen Anil Chakravarthy, a company president who oversees development and sales of its products for businesses, to take over for outgoing CEO Shantanu Narayen, effective Dec. 1.

The appointment, which caps a six-month search, suggests that Adobe believes its best prospects for future growth lie in products that companies use to analyze customers’ purchasing patterns and automate sales and marketing campaigns. That portion of Adobe’s business is seen as being less threatened by generative AI than its products for graphic designers and photographers.

Chakravarthy, who joined Adobe in 2020, previously spent five years as CEO of data management firm Informatica, which Salesforce acquired last year for around $8 billion.

Narayen, who joined Adobe in 1998 and has been CEO since 2007, helped expand the company’s focus to marketing automation and data analytics products, which helped attract more business from Fortune 500 companies. He is also credited with shifting Adobe’s business from selling packaged software to cloud applications more than a decade ago.