Adobe has gone from one Indian-origin CEO to another.
Adobe’s Board of Directors announced that Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations, will become Adobe’s next president and chief executive officer and join the Board of Directors effective December 1, 2026. He replaces Shantanu Narayen, who announced last March he would step down after 18 years in the role. Narayen will transition to executive chair and work closely with Chakravarthy to ensure a smooth transition and support Adobe’s ongoing transformation.
The board said a special committee conducted a six-and-a-half-month selection process before unanimously approving the appointment. Adobe is tapping a new CEO as its stock has fallen alongside other software names this year due to investor fears of AI disruption, and its shares have fallen around 18% this year after declining over 21% in 2025.
An Engineer’s Path From Varanasi To MIT
Chakravarthy’s academic roots trace back to India, where he earned a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi, between 1985 and 1989. He then moved to the United States, where he pursued a Ph.D at the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1990 to 1995 — a rigorous grounding in engineering and technology that would go on to shape a career spanning consulting, cybersecurity, enterprise software and, eventually, one of the world’s most influential creative software companies.
Career Beginnings At McKinsey
Chakravarthy’s professional career began not in a lab or a product team, but in consulting. He spent over four and a half years, from September 1995 to February 2000, as an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company, where he built a foundation in strategy and business operations that would inform his approach to leadership in the years to come.
From there, he briefly served as Vice President of Marketing at Logictier between 2000 and 2001, before moving into a more product-focused role as Director of Product Management at VeriSign, a position he held from December 2001 to May 2004.
Nearly A Decade At Symantec
Chakravarthy’s next stop was Symantec, where he spent close to nine and a half years and rose steadily through the ranks. He started as Senior Director of Business Operations in 2004, before being promoted to Vice President of Business Critical Services in 2005.
In a notable move, he then took charge of Symantec’s India operations, serving as Vice President of India Technical Operations from April 2006 to January 2008 — heading the company’s India center. He returned to a global mandate soon after, leading Symantec’s worldwide Enterprise Services business as Senior Vice President from 2008 to 2009.
His responsibilities only grew from there. He held the role of Senior Vice President of Enterprise Product Operations, followed by Senior Vice President of the Storage and Availability Management Group, where he oversaw products like Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, FileStore, Command Central and Data Insight. He capped off his Symantec tenure as Senior Vice President of the Enterprise Security Group and, finally, as Executive Vice President of Information Security in 2013.
Chief Executive Officer At Informatica
Prior to his current role, Chakravarthy served as CEO for four years at Informatica, a global leader in enterprise cloud data management. He originally joined Informatica in 2013 as executive vice president. As Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer between September 2013 and August 2015, he helped shape the company’s product roadmap before being elevated to the top job.
As CEO of Informatica from August 2015 to January 2020, Chakravarthy defined the strategy for the company’s next phase of growth and delivered several major product releases, including what was regarded as the most important platform release in the company’s history — Informatica v10 — along with Informatica Big Data Management.
During this period, he also took on his first Independent Board Member role, at USAA Federal Savings Bank, serving from December 2015 to September 2020.
Joining Adobe
Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 to lead its digital experience business and later took on responsibility for improving how customers interact with Adobe, as well as overseeing its global sales and customer-support teams. As President of Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration Business, he has spent close to seven years steering the company’s push into personalized, AI-driven customer engagement, based out of San Jose.
During his tenure, Chakravarthy oversaw the expansion of Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and helped develop products including Adobe CX Enterprise, GenStudio and Brand Visibility. He also played a role in scaling Adobe Experience Platform and integrating the acquisitions of Workfront and Semrush. The division Chakravarthy leads generated $5.86 billion in sales in the 2025 fiscal year that ended in November, about a quarter of the company’s total.
He has also continued to build his boardroom experience alongside his Adobe responsibilities, serving as an Independent Board Member at Ansys from October 2021 to July 2025, and more recently joining the board of FIS in January 2026.
Taking The Helm At Adobe
Speaking on the appointment, Narayen said, “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.”
Chakravarthy has said he would focus on driving growth in what he called the next era of “agentic software,” as Adobe works to integrate AI more deeply across its product portfolio. His appointment comes at a pivotal moment for Adobe, as the company tries to reassure investors worried about disruptions to its business from advances in AI technology, while fending off newer rivals like Figma and Canva.
Chakravarthy will officially take over as CEO and join Adobe’s board on December 1, 2026, becoming the second Indian-origin leader to run the company after Narayen’s 18-year stint at the helm.
Part Of A Bigger Trend
Chakravarthy’s elevation adds another name to a list that has come to define Silicon Valley’s upper ranks — one where Indian-origin, and often IIT-educated, executives run some of the world’s biggest technology companies. Sundar Pichai, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, has led Google and Alphabet since 2015. Satya Nadella, who studied at Manipal Institute of Technology, has run Microsoft since 2014. Arvind Krishna, an IIT Kanpur alumnus, has been CEO of IBM since 2020, while Shantanu Narayen himself, an Osmania University graduate, spent 18 years running Adobe before this transition. Chakravarthy’s ascent is a reminder that this isn’t a one-off phenomenon but a durable pipeline — one that keeps running from India’s engineering campuses straight to the corner offices of American big tech.
