Adobe's next CEO is Anil Chakravarthy. What happens now?

Marketo users might notice something curious about the header image. Adobe's CEO is nowhere in it. The man in the photograph is Steve Lucas, then CEO of Marketo, in San Francisco in 2017. Stay with that for a moment.

Artificial intelligence is forcing investors to rethink the economics of enterprise software. Adobe's announcement that CEO Shantanu Narayen will step down after nearly two decades highlights how leadership transitions often coincide with major technology shifts. The timing is not coincidental.

A contrast that tells the story

Adobe continues to report strong financial results. Its subscription platforms remain highly profitable and widely adopted across industries. The share price has struggled for a year. That gap between operational performance and market verdict is the story of enterprise software right now.

Operational performance remains strong, and markets are asking a different question anyway. Nobody doubts the current products are good. The doubt is whether the economic logic underlying large enterprise software platforms, deep integration, high switching costs and multi-year licence contracts, will hold once AI tools offer capable alternatives at a fraction of the price.

This same question is being asked about Salesforce, HubSpot, Atlassian, and every other platform that built its business model on the stickiness of enterprise workflows. McKinsey's Rewired playbook describes what to build in response; it is quieter on where the value lands. The AI era is forcing a re-examination of where software value actually comes from.

Why enterprise platforms still matter in the AI era

Much of the current AI excitement focuses on individual tools. Generative applications, specialised copilots, vertical AI products. The narrative is disruptive: agile new tools replacing legacy platforms. But enterprise environments operate under very different constraints than the individual productivity context where many of these tools gain their initial traction.

Large organisations require controlled access to sensitive customer data, compliance with regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions, integration across sales, marketing, finance, and customer service systems, and auditability of decisions that influence revenue and customer relationships. These requirements do not disappear in an AI era. They become more demanding.

Many AI tools gaining traction today are adopted bottom-up. Individual employees experiment with generative tools, build automations, and explore new workflows. That experimentation is valuable. But it creates governance debt. Ungoverned AI tool adoption in enterprise environments generates fragmented data flows, inconsistent customer experiences, and compliance exposure that typically surfaces twelve to eighteen months after the experimentation phase.

The three questions this piece posed in March

What leadership profile will the board prioritise? A product innovator, a platform strategist, or a leader focused on capital markets communication would each signal a different direction for Adobe. The choice will reveal whether the board believes Adobe's primary challenge is product differentiation, AI integration, or investor narrative.

How will Adobe translate AI capability into sustainable economic value? Investors will closely watch how AI features influence adoption, pricing, and recurring revenue growth. Adding AI features to existing products does not automatically translate to pricing power. The question is whether Adobe can demonstrate that its AI layer creates enough measurable value to justify the platform premium in a world of capable alternatives.

How will Adobe position its platforms in a market where AI tools are available outside traditional enterprise software ecosystems? The competitive threat comes from the cumulative effect of specialised AI tools that address individual workflow needs without requiring the full platform commitment. No single rival is needed for that.

What does the choice of Anil Chakravarthy signal?

The board answered the first of the three questions I posed in March. It chose Anil Chakravarthy.

Calling him the platform strategist is useful shorthand. It is not a prediction of Adobe's strategy.

There is a reasonably well-established management idea behind that distinction. Hambrick and Mason's upper-echelons theory argues that executives' backgrounds partially predict strategic choices, because experience affects how they interpret situations and which options receive their attention. The important word is partially. A chief executive inherits a board mandate, an organisation, a portfolio of products, investment commitments and an economic reality that constrain what any individual leader can do.

So Chakravarthy's CV is one signal. The organisational choice around him is another.

In FY2025, Adobe's Digital Experience segment generated $5.86 billion, or 25% of group revenue. Digital Media generated $17.65 billion, or 74%. Adobe has since changed the way it presents its primary customer metrics, but that historical split gives useful scale to the decision.

His remit is wider than the smaller of those two businesses. He also runs worldwide field operations, a responsibility he took on in 2020. Adobe's own announcement credits him with expanding both Customer Experience Orchestration and field operations, scaling Adobe Experience Platform, building products including CX Enterprise, GenStudio and Brand Visibility, and integrating Workfront and Semrush. Before Adobe, he spent four years as CEO of Informatica.

David Wadhwani provides the other half of the context. He led Adobe's creativity and productivity organisation and was widely regarded as a serious succession candidate. Jefferies had expected him to be the "rational choice", in part because he ran roughly three quarters of Adobe's revenue. He is now leaving the company.

It would be easy to turn that into a neat story: Adobe chose enterprise orchestration over creative software. I don't think the evidence supports going that far.

What it does support is a narrower observation. When Adobe's board had to choose a leader for the next phase, it selected an executive whose recent career sits at the intersection of enterprise platforms, integration and the commercial relationship with large customers. It did so while the executive running Adobe's largest business is leaving. That makes the organisation Adobe builds around Chakravarthy worth watching.

His background tells us something about the problems he is likely to recognise quickly. It does not tell us where Adobe will put the next dollar of R&D, how it will price AI, whether Creative Cloud or Experience Cloud gains organisational influence, or what happens to individual products. Those answers will come from appointments, investment decisions, product roadmaps and commercial behaviour rather than a résumé.

There is another reason not to over-read the change. Shantanu Narayen becomes executive chair and Adobe explicitly says he will work closely with Chakravarthy through the transition. Adobe is describing a managed handover rather than a clean break with the previous regime.

The first public test comes quickly. Q3 FY2026 earnings on 10 September are still the result of the organisation Narayen has been running, though the succession is likely to feature in the analyst discussion. Q4 will still largely reflect a business Chakravarthy inherits. His own strategic fingerprints will take longer to become visible.

Who inherits Customer Experience Orchestration?

Adobe has not answered that yet, and for enterprise customers it may matter more than the chief executive's previous job title.

Chakravarthy currently combines Customer Experience Orchestration with worldwide field operations. Adobe has not said whether those responsibilities will remain together, be split between different executives, or temporarily remain partly with Chakravarthy after he becomes CEO.

For customers running Marketo Engage, Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition or Real-Time CDP, the appointment matters because the next leader of that organisation will have substantial influence over product priorities, investment and how overlapping parts of the portfolio are brought together.

That is different from saying one executive personally decides those roadmaps. Product leadership, engineering priorities, corporate strategy and capital allocation all contribute. The useful signal will be the organisation Adobe puts in place around the products.

What this means for Marketo Engage customers

For Marketo Engage customers, there is no operational reason to change a 2027 plan because Adobe named a new chief executive.

There is, however, a reason to pay attention to the organisation underneath him. Watch who inherits Customer Experience Orchestration, whether worldwide field operations stays attached to it, and how Adobe describes the respective roles of Marketo Engage and AJO B2B as FY2027 product planning becomes visible.

In practical terms, map the workflows you rely on today before interpreting the next roadmap announcement. Which depend specifically on Marketo Engage? Which could realistically move to AJO B2B? Where does Real-Time CDP sit in the architecture? That gives you a way to assess organisational and product changes against your own operating model rather than Adobe's messaging.

For enterprise customers, the answer may turn out less dramatic than current narratives suggest. Large organisations still need governed data environments, integrated systems, and secure operational infrastructure. If anything, the AI era may increase the value of platforms capable of orchestrating these capabilities at scale - because the governance and integration burden grows when AI tools are introduced into the workflow.

The most interesting question the Adobe leadership transition raises concerns where enterprise software value accumulates in an AI era. Adobe is only the example. The companies that maintain durable positions will be those whose platforms sit at the governed, tightly integrated layer that AI tools require to operate reliably in production. That is exactly the layer that most enterprise marketing stacks have underinvested in, and the reason so much AI spend never reaches the bottom line.

Which brings us back to Steve Lucas and that 2017 photograph. Marketo was acquired by Adobe in 2018 for $4.75 billion, primarily because of the depth of its enterprise workflow integration and the governance infrastructure it had built around B2B marketing automation. The value was in the foundation. It still is.