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.
