Adobe hands the CEO job to its agentic software chief
Two big ownership stories landed after the OpenAI noise died down: Adobe finally named the person who has to defend it against AI-native rivals, and Oura put real numbers behind the smart-ring boom it helped start.
Adobe will hand the chief executive role to Anil Chakravarthy on December 1, ending Shantanu Narayen's run of more than 18 years at the top. Narayen stays on as executive chair, and the board framed the pick as continuity with a twist: Chakravarthy joined Adobe in January 2020 to run the digital experience business, later picked up worldwide field operations, and is currently president of Customer Experience Orchestration — the unit that produced CX Enterprise, GenStudio, Brand Visibility, and the CX Enterprise Coworker agent. Before Adobe he ran Informatica for four years. Lead independent director Frank Calderoni said the board "unanimously determined" he was right for the next chapter after a "rigorous selection process."
The framing from both men is explicitly about agents, not design tools. Narayen said he is confident Chakravarthy is "the right person to lead Adobe's growth in an AI-driven era," and Chakravarthy said he is energized by "the next era of agentic software for creativity, productivity and customer experience" — which is a quiet admission of where Adobe thinks its revenue comes from next. Reuters reported the succession lands with Adobe shares down roughly 18% this year after a drop of over 21% in 2025, with investors worried that AI challengers like Figma and Canva can erode a franchise built on per-seat creative software, and the CFO seat still open after Dan Durn's June exit. Shares fell about 1% in after-hours trading on the news.
Our read: this is the board choosing an operator who has already shipped AI products into enterprise accounts over a visionary, and that is the right call for a company whose problem is distribution rather than models. The risk is that "agentic software for creativity" is still mostly a slide — Adobe's AI features have to prove they hold seat counts, not just demo well. Chakravarthy has nearly three months before the handover formally lands, and an earnings call on September 10 to set the tone first.
Oura filed for a US IPO, disclosing $1.21 billion in revenue for the nine months ended June 30 — and a net loss attributable to stockholders of $924.3 million. A year earlier the same period produced $697.6 million in revenue against a net loss of $182.8 million. The company attributes much of that loss to a deemed dividend owed to holders of its redeemable convertible preferred stock, which is an accounting artifact of going public rather than a cash burn line. Oura intends to list on Nasdaq under the ticker "OURA," with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Co., and BofA Securities among the underwriters, and says it sold more than 3.6 million rings in the last year.
The interesting number is the growth, not the loss: revenue is up about 73% year over year on hardware that most people still think of as a niche sleep tracker. That is the same bet we covered this morning in Qualcomm backs Ultrahuman's $70M bet on rings that compute — that the ring becomes a general-purpose health computer rather than an accessory. Oura going public turns that thesis into something the market has to price every quarter.
If Adobe's next chapter is agentic software, would you rather it be sold to you by the person who shipped the agents or by someone brought in from outside? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Adobe press release · Reuters · Techmeme · Bloomberg · Briefs · PiQ Markets · Techmeme
