Adobe had plenty of options when it came to replacing Shantanu Narayen.
The vendor could have turned to a Creative Cloud leader, looked outside the business, or picked an executive with a more obvious AI pedigree. Instead, the company chose Anil Chakravarthy, President of Adobe’s Customer Experience Orchestration business and worldwide field operations.
It came as something of a surprise, but for those with a CX bias, it was certainly a pleasant one.
This sentiment was shared by Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research:
“I am gonna be totally honest, I was surprised. But I think it made a whole lot of sense.”
The question is not whether Adobe suddenly cares about customer experience – it has spent years building a major Digital Experience business – the more interesting question is whether having its CX orchestration leader in the CEO role will make Adobe’s broad portfolio feel more connected, more commercially focused, and more useful to enterprise buyers.
Adobe’s CX Story is Bigger Than Experience Cloud
It would be easy to paint Chakravarthy’s appointment as a shift away from Adobe’s creative roots toward customer experience.
Arguably, that misses the point.
Miller believes that Adobe has always had an experience-centric view, even before the modern CX category existed. Its creative and document tools were built to help organizations get work done and communicate with audiences, not simply to give designers another application.
“Experience is important because Adobe has thought experience has been important from its earliest days,” Miller said.
What has changed, however, is the scale of the ambition.
Adobe now positions CX Enterprise as an “agentic system of record” for customer experience orchestration, spanning prospect identification, engagement, conversion, and loyalty.
The stack includes Adobe Experience Platform, GenStudio, Experience Manager, agentic web applications, Brand Visibility, and CX Enterprise Coworker.
That is a much broader proposition than campaign management or web analytics. It also demands a convincing story across data, content, marketing, operations, and AI.
Transformation Could Matter More Than the CX Title
Chakravarthy’s current Adobe role is important, but it is not the only reason his appointment stands out.
He joined Adobe in 2020 to lead Digital Experience, later taking on worldwide field operations. Before that, he spent four years as CEO of Informatica, the enterprise cloud data management provider that was recently acquired by Salesforce.
That background could prove particularly useful as enterprises attempt to connect fragmented customer data, marketing workflows, content production, and AI deployments, as Miller explains:
“It’s not just that he comes from that side of the business. He was the CEO of Informatica, right?
“He understands the business of data, the business of enterprise, the business of relying on infrastructure, architecture, data, deployment.”
It is evident that this should not be viewed simply as Adobe elevating the executive who ran Experience Cloud.
Miller’s interpretation is that the company has selected a transformation leader. Adobe already has many of the building blocks for a connected customer experience strategy. The bigger task is helping customers understand how those pieces fit together and making them easier to deploy across the business.
For many enterprises, the issue is not a lack of AI tools. Marketing owns one platform, IT owns another, service operates elsewhere, and content teams are left trying to keep up with all of them.
A More Joined-Up Adobe?
Adobe has been moving toward a broader enterprise conversation for some time.
GenStudio brings content creation and campaign execution closer together. Experience Platform aims to provide a data layer for real-time engagement. Experience Manager supports web experiences, while Brand Visibility and Brand Concierge extend the proposition into AI search, discovery, and conversational engagement.
Workfront and Semrush, integrated under Chakravarthy’s leadership, add workflow and brand-visibility capabilities to the mix.
Miller pointed to Adobe Express as an earlier example of the company lowering the barrier to governed creativity. Rather than having a finance or sales employee request every asset from a design team, Adobe gave non-traditional users access to templates within approved brand standards.
According to Miller, the same thinking could apply across the wider CX stack:
“I do think that we’re going to see a very interesting outreach to the kind of CIO, CDO, COO group that has maybe felt that Adobe’s conversation was not for them.”
That may be the opportunity for Chakravarthy. Adobe has long been a major brand for CMOs and creative professionals. It could now make a stronger case that customer experience orchestration is also a business transformation issue for technology, operations, and data leaders.
AI Still Needs to Earn Its Place
There are signs Adobe’s AI bet is gaining traction.
In Q3 FY2026, Adobe said AI-first ending ARR had exceeded $650 million, growing more than 150% year over year. It also reported more than 1,700 customers and early adopters for CX Enterprise Coworker since its June general availability.
Brand Visibility paid customers doubled quarter over quarter, while AEM, GenStudio, and Experience Platform and apps each recorded ARR growth above 20% year over year.
Those are encouraging figures, yet they do not remove the pressure on Adobe’s next leadership team.
Analysts highlighted that remaining performance obligations grew 8% year over year and net new ARR had declined year over year. Adobe said it is prioritizing freemium adoption and building a wider funnel before optimizing conversion.
That can be a sensible long-term strategy. But it leaves Chakravarthy with a clear commercial test to show that AI adoption, new users, and product experimentation become durable enterprise value.
Miller’s warning is useful here.
“Don’t just toss a GenAI into a room and see what it eats,” she said.
The question for Adobe customers is whether its agents and copilots can reduce workflow friction, improve customer journey decisions, and strengthen content governance, rather than simply add another layer of technology to manage.
The Next Adobe Signal is Still to Come
Chakravarthy does not formally take over until December 1, with Narayen moving to executive chair. Adobe is also still operating with Steve Day as interim CFO.
There are further leadership questions. Adobe needs to fill the president roles for Digital Experience and Digital Media following Chakravarthy’s elevation and David Wadhwani’s departure.
For Miller, those appointments could be more revealing than the CEO announcement itself:
“What I’m keeping my eye on when it comes to Adobe, what the big signal is going to be about where is Adobe going, who’s in those spots?”
The big takeaway from Miller appears to be that Adobe is not entering a reset. Its CX portfolio is growing, its AI offerings are gaining adoption, and Chakravarthy helped build much of that momentum.
But he now has the chance to make Adobe’s customer experience orchestration story clearer.
If he can connect the company’s data, content, AI, and engagement assets into something enterprises can more easily buy, govern, and use together, this may prove to be far more than a conventional internal succession.
