After 18 years at the helm, leading nearly 100 earnings calls and changing Adobe in more ways than one, CEO Shantanu Narayan is ready to hand over the reins. The longtime CEO announced his decision to step down in a memo to employees today, with the responsibility now falling on the board of directors to identify a successor. Following the change at a future date, Narayan says he will remain as Chairman of the Board to help the new CEO – he remembers the past, saying Adobe co-founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke supported him in the transition.
Narayan is confident about Adobe’s journey. “The opportunity before us is extraordinary. Together, we are uniquely positioned to lead it – and I am deeply committed to doing so as we look ahead and prepare to name Adobe’s next CEO. I am more confident than ever that Adobe’s best days are still ahead,” he told employees. Narayan joined Adobe in 1998 and became CEO in 2007.
The revenue story is the strongest part of Narayan’s legacy at Adobe. When he took over in late 2007, Adobe finished the last year with $3.16 billion in annual revenue. As he exited, Adobe’s most recent fiscal year was $23.8 billion in revenue, up 10.5% year-over-year. This is an increase of approximately 7.5 times in 18 years, with no meaningful decline.
Narayan inherited a company that made excellent software, but sold it the old-fashioned way – as a boxed disc, a one-time purchase, and the customer did that for a few years. What they saw, and what most of the industry was realizing at that time, was that the future was subscriptions. While Adobe did not invent SaaS or the software as a service model, Narayan ensured that it became one of the first major software companies to work solely on this model. The risks were high considering that its most loved and used products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom were at stake. On the agenda was a recurring revenue bet that seemed risky at the time.
Adobe’s biggest milestone over the past few decades is Creative Cloud, which launched in 2013. Creatives were unhappy, forums (which were a rage before social media) erupted in anger, and complaints were rampant. After initial inertia, the product got better as Adobe focused on continuous, periodic updates rather than saving everything for the next big release.
Adobe Creative Cloud has more than 41 million paid customers by the end of 2025, nearly doubling its user base in five years. The platform adds more than 1 million new customers per quarter, bringing total monthly active users across Creative Cloud, Acrobat and Firefly, including individual consumers, students and business professionals, now to more than 850 million. These numbers illustrate how the cloud-based subscription pivot is central to the transformation of Narayan’s company.
Over the past few years, Adobe has leaned heavily toward enabling artificial intelligence (AI) in creative and document workflows. At the core of these experiences is the company’s own Firefly model, its answer to the generative AI competition. Some of the recent moves include adding agentic AI vision to popular apps including Photoshop and Express, integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, significant improvements to the Firefly video model, and an emphasis on adding a broader spectrum of models within its apps to increase value for users. The strategy is clear, building AI that is commercially safe, trained on licensed content and deeply integrated into existing products in a human-driven approach.
Then there’s the deal that didn’t happen. In 2022, Adobe announced a $20 billion bid for Figma – a browser-based design tool that had become the de facto standard for product and UX (user experience) teams, and a real threat to Adobe’s core business. After regulators backed out, the deal was canceled by the end of 2023. The European Commission stated that its initial view was that the acquisition could reduce competition in the global markets for interactive product design software and other creative design software. The UK CMA’s provisional findings said the deal was likely to harm innovation in the software used by the majority of UK digital designers. A rare swing-and-miss for Narine.
At the moment, there is no confirmation on when Adobe will announce the new CEO. However, the obvious internal race may be David Wadhwani, president of the creativity and productivity business, which includes Adobe’s crown jewels—Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Acrobat, Express, and Firefly.
Another name in the running could be Dan Dern, Adobe’s chief financial officer, who oversees finance, technology, security and operations, giving him company-wide visibility over direction. The board may also consider Anil Chakraborty, who is president of the customer experience orchestration business, and is responsible for the company’s worldwide field operations – including enterprise sales, professional services and customer success.
