The CEO of Adobe has decided to transition from his position once the company appoints a successor, the company announced March 12.
Shantanu Narayen has served as the Adobe CEO for 18 years. He will remain chair of the board, according to the company’s announcement.
In addition to its popular creative suite that allows photo and video editing, Adobe also operates an ecommerce platform and offers site design and development, along with web analytics and more. More than 130 of the Top 2000 online retailers in North America use Adobe’s ecommerce platform. Meanwhile, more than 100 use it for site design, and more than 200 use it for web analytics.
What the Adobe CEO said about his role transition
In his email to employees, which the company shared publicly, Narayen noted that his final earnings call was his 100th with Adobe.
He said he will work with Frank Calderoni, Adobe’s lead director, and that rest of the board of directors to identify the successor to the CEO role.
“What attracted me to Adobe 28 years ago was our leadership in creating new market categories, world-class products, a relentless desire to innovate in every functional area of the company and the people I met during the interview process,” he wrote.
In his time with Adobe, the company grew from about 3,000 employees to more than 30,000, according to Narayen. Also in that time, its revenue has grown from under $1 billion to more than $25 billion, he said.
He said Adobe is well-positioned to lead in the AI era.
“The next era of creativity is being written right now — shaped by AI, by new workflows and by entirely new forms of expression,” Narayen wrote.
He said he has confidence in Adobe’s technology and in its employees’ “ingenuity, resilience and commitment to customers.”
“I will ensure that I set up Adobe for its next decade of greatness with the right leader and executive team, in partnership with the Board, while continuing to deliver on our FY26 Must Wins,” he wrote.
Adobe’s involvement in the AI era
In February, the company announced it would align its Adobe Commerce platform with emerging agentic commerce standards. That would position its technology to support AI-driven product discovery, comparison and checkout.
Adobe said it will support the Universal Commerce Protocol and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, expanding on its earlier commitment to the Agent Payments Protocol.
This comes as data from its Adobe Analytics segment highlighted statistics about shoppers who used AI during the holiday shopping season. Shoppers who navigated to online retailers’ websites via AI referrals during the 2025 holiday season converted at higher rates than their counterparts, spent more money and spent more time on those ecommerce sites, Adobe Analytics found.
Generative AI-powered chat services and browsers also accounted for 693.4% more traffic to retailers’ websites in the 2025 holiday season than the previous year’s comparable period, according to Adobe.
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