Seven Days to the First Question

On September 2, 2026, Adobe's board gave itself ninety days. By December 1, Anil Chakravarthy, president of the company's Customer Experience Orchestration business and its worldwide field operations, would become chief executive officer. Shantanu Narayen would retire from that title and keep the chair as executive chair.

The press release is dated September 3. The Form 8-K, filed September 8, records a second event from September 2: David Wadhwani notified the company that he was stepping down as president of the Creativity & Productivity Business, effective September 27.

One successor named. One president leaving. And seven days after the announcement, on September 10, Chakravarthy had to take his first earnings call as the man who would run it all.

The Board Made Its Case

Frank Calderoni, Adobe's lead independent director, led the special committee that oversaw the selection. In the release he said the board had "unanimously determined that Anil is the right leader for Adobe’s next chapter of growth." He added that Chakravarthy had spent six and a half years expanding the Customer Experience Orchestration business and the worldwide field operations.

The record behind that sentence is short and specific. Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 as executive vice president and general manager of Digital Experience. In September 2020 he took on worldwide field operations. In December 2021 he became president. Before Adobe he spent four years as chief executive of Informatica, which he first joined in 2013, and held executive roles at Symantec, VeriSign and McKinsey & Company.

The board filing added a line that matters to anyone reading for conflict: the appointment was not made under any arrangement or understanding with any other person.

The Field He Already Ran

The job that prepared him was not a product job alone. By the end of 2020, he told analysts, "Shantanu asked me to take on actually our enterprise field operations." That put him in front of the customers who buy every part of the portfolio.

He said "we represented all of Adobe with our customers," and he gave Disney as the example: "they think of us as one Adobe and that's been important." He put the base he now looks across at hundreds of thousands of small businesses and more than 20,000 enterprise customers.

The question is whether a seat built on selling the whole company is enough preparation for running it.

The First Questions Were About Numbers

The quarter he inherited was not in trouble. Narayen reported $6.76 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 12 percent, and AI-first ending annual recurring revenue above $650 million, growing more than 150 percent. Reflecting on 29 years at Adobe, Narayen said annual revenue had grown from less than $1 billion to over $26 billion. Chakravarthy reported that subscription revenue for Business Professionals & Consumers reached $1.91 billion, up 15 percent.

Then the questions came. Jay Vleeschhouwer of Griffin Securities pointed to remaining performance obligations, the contracted revenue not yet recognized. Growth had slipped into single digits, he said, the first time since early fiscal 2023, and down from the prior quarter.

Steve Day, the interim chief financial officer, gave the figures: remaining performance obligations up 8 percent, the current portion up 9 percent. He tied the pace to the push to acquire users through a free tier, and said both measures typically step up in the fourth quarter and stay roughly flat for the next three.

A second analyst noted that the full-year guidance raise came in slightly short of the third-quarter beat. Day answered that nothing in the business had changed.

Adobe was, in other words, introducing its next chief executive while the finance chair was held on an interim basis and the president of its Creativity & Productivity Business was heading out the door.

The Bet On Agentic Software

Asked what he sees ahead, Chakravarthy did not hedge on direction. "I do believe that every SaaS company will be going through the transformation to agentic software," he said, comparing it to the earlier move from on-premises software to subscriptions, which Adobe, in his words, "executed very successfully."

He described what customers ask for. First, a product architecture in which people can choose their own interface, whether conversational or traditional. Second, in his phrase, "they're looking for model flexibility." Third, enterprise data and context, so results are usable and predictable. Fourth, "they're looking for value," which he tied to Adobe's forward-deployed engineering and value-realization teams.

The thesis already shows up in product. He said Acrobat's capabilities were being extended to ChatGPT, Chrome, Claude, Microsoft Edge and WhatsApp, and that people open more than 400 billion PDFs with Acrobat every year. Asked about his own challenges, he pointed to more than 1 billion monthly active users and decades of PDF expertise, and to "the new capabilities required for the world of agentic software."

Part of the plan runs through interfaces he named himself: ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot, alongside Adobe's own.

Ninety Days, Then The Seat

Chakravarthy's own account of the interval was practical. "I have until December 1 to work closely with Shantanu," he said, and the first focus was the fourth quarter and closing out fiscal 2026. Beyond that he listed Adobe's MAX conference, where "this will be my first MAX and I'm looking forward to hosting that," along with time with customers and employees, and "building the leadership team."

That last item now has a documented vacancy to consider: the 8-K says Wadhwani will remain with the company as a senior advisor for a transition period after September 27. It does not name a replacement.

He summed up the stretch himself: "So, it's going to be a busy fall."

The board set the date on September 2. The first earnings call came on September 10. The next fixed point is MAX, and then December 1, when the title Narayen held becomes Chakravarthy's.