Another Indian to head Adobe: Are they better at running Big Tech?

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Key points

• Anil Chakravarthy is regarding to become the latest Indian-origin executive to take charge of a major American technology business.
• Moving from India to the United States for university or work often means entering a highly competitive environment with few guarantees.
• The Indians who reach the upper levels of American technology are a highly selected group.
• Chakravarthy's career illustrates the type of leadership pipeline that has produced plenty of of the industry's Indian-origin CEOs.
• The nature of the technology industry has changed, and that may have rose the value of the leadership characteristics associated with Indian-origin executives.

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Anil Chakravarthy is regarding to become the latest Indian-origin executive to take charge of a major American technology business. Adobe has chosen Chakravarthy, a firm insider who joined in 2020, to succeed Shantanu Narayen after more than 18 years under his leadership. The succession is striking since it means one Indian-origin executive is handing the CEO job to another just as artificial intelligence is putting Adobe's business model under pressure. But Chakravarthy's appointment is additionally part of a much bigger phenomenon. Indian-origin executives are now deeply embedded in the leadership ranks of American technology. The question is no longer why a few Indians have created it to the top. It is why so plenty of of them appear particularly well suited to running some of America's largest and most complicated technology businesses.

Chakravarthy fits a familiar pattern.

Chakravarthy's career illustrates the type of leadership pipeline that has produced plenty of of the industry's Indian-origin CEOs. He studied computer science and engineering at the IIT Varanasi, before earning a master's degree and PhD from MIT. He worked at McKinsey and held senior positions at VeriSign and Symantec. He then spent four years as CEO of cloud data-management firm Informatica before joining Adobe in 2020. At Adobe, he initially led the Digital Experience business before taking on broader responsibility for customer relationships, global sales and customer backing. That makes his promotion particularly relevant to Adobe's current challenge. The firm is not simply looking for someone who understands software. It needs a leader capable of managing a massive organisation while responding to AI-driven changes in its market. Live Events.

New twist to India's food economy brings up a Rs 1L cr opportunity That is a description that fits plenty of of the Indian-origin executives who have risen through American technology. The leadership bench has become much deeper.

For years, the Indian presence in Silicon Valley was represented by a handful of superstar CEOs such as Sundar Pichai at Google, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Narayen at Adobe and Arvind Krishna at IBM. That is no longer an adequate description. Vaibhav Taneja is CFO of Tesla. Sabih Khan is Apple's senior vice president of operations. Neal Mohan runs YouTube. Sachin Katti has a senior leadership role at Cisco. Indian-origin executives have additionally risen into notable positions at firms including Anthropic, OpenAI and Rubrik. What matters is not simply the number of Indian-origin names at the top. They are spread throughout engineering, product, finance, operations and sales. These are precisely the functions that feed the senior-management pipeline in sizeable technology businesses. There is therefore something more substantial happening than a series of individual success stories. A generation of technically trained Indian professionals has moved through American corporations and accumulated the experience required to run them. Notably, the traits may matter as much as the talent.

This is where the explanation goes beyond immigration, education and professional networks. A 2025 Newsweek analysis conducted in partnership with leadership advisory firm ghSMART drew on its proprietary CEO Genome data covering roughly 30, 000 CEOs and C-suite executives. An Indian firm caught in the middle of arms scandal that toppled Estonian defence minister The analysis discovered that executives of Indian descent were more than five times as probable to take calculated risks and almost six times as probable to embrace challenges. While scoring particularly strongly on proactive adaptation, they were additionally three times as probable to demonstrate resilience and process orientation. In practice, the findings are significant as they point towards a potential leadership advantage rather than merely a selection advantage. It would be too solid to conclude from this that Indian-origin executives are inherently better leaders. The data comes from ghSMART's proprietary assessments and the published analysis does not provide enough methodological detail to establish why these differences occur or whether they apply throughout every industry. But the findings are tough to ignore when considered alongside the actual careers of Indian-origin technology leaders. For context, the traits identified by ghSMART are unusually relevant to sizeable technology businesses. A CEO running a global technology firm must take risks without gambling the organisation's future. They must accord with repeated technological disruption. They must absorb setbacks without losing strategic focus. And they must create a vast organisation execute consistently. Resilience and process orientation are particularly valuable once a firm has grown beyond the startup phase. Major Tech increasingly needs operators.

Meanwhile, the nature of the technology industry has changed, and that may have rose the value of the leadership characteristics associated with Indian-origin executives. The largest technology firms are no longer simply collections of brilliant engineers pursuing ambitious ideas. They are multinational institutions with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees, enormous supply chains, complex regulatory relationships and customers spread throughout the world. Running them requires patience and organisational discipline. In practice, a CEO has to reconcile competing interests among engineers, product managers, sales teams, investors, regulators and governments. The ability to align sizeable groups can matter as much as having a compelling personal vision. This is one reason the careers of Pichai, Nadella, Narayen and Krishna are revealing. None built their reputations primarily as charismatic founders. They spent years inside sizeable organisations learning how products are developed, how teams function and how decisions secure created. They learned the internal mechanics of the corporation before being asked to run it. Chakravarthy follows the same broad trajectory. His experience spans consulting, enterprise software, CEO-level management and then a senior operating role inside Adobe. That kind of background is valuable to a firm that has to navigate an enormous installed customer base while transforming its products around AI. The selection effect still matters.

None of this makes the selection argument irrelevant. The Indians who reach the upper levels of American technology are a highly selected group. The journey from India to an elite engineering institution, an American graduate school or a major technology firm involves intense competition. India's massive population additionally creates a particularly substantial pool from which this group can emerge. In practice, the United States then attracts a substantial proportion of its most technically ambitious professionals. Immigration reinforces the effect. Indians accounted for roughly three-quarters of approved H-1B petitions in 2023, with computer-related occupations making up the overwhelming majority of H-1B employment. Indian students have additionally become the largest group of international students in the United States. That means the Indian-origin population inside American technology is not representative of India as a whole. It has been filtered by education, ambition, professional achievement and the ability to navigate an extremely competitive migration system. Selection therefore helps explain who gets into the pipeline. It does not necessarily explain why those who obtain into it appear to perform so well as leaders. Culture may reinforce the corporate advantage.

In practice, the leadership characteristics identified by ghSMART could have a number of explanations, and culture is one possibility. Indian professionals often grow up in environments where academic competition is intense and educational achievement is heavily emphasised. Engineering has traditionally enjoyed exceptional status in India's professional hierarchy. Plenty of ambitious students are pushed towards technical education and competitive examinations from an early age. That can produce habits that afterwards translate well into corporate leadership such as persistence through challenging challenges, comfort with competition and a willingness to work within demanding systems. But there is another cultural feature that may matter. Plenty of Indian professionals who enter American corporations have spent their careers navigating between different institutional environments. They may have studied in India, earned advanced degrees in America, worked with colleagues throughout a number of countries and managed teams with particularly different professional backgrounds. That experience can cultivate adaptability. It can additionally produce consensus-building and stakeholder management less foreign. In a multinational corporation, the ability to persuade individuals who do not share the same assumptions can be an notable leadership asset. The immigrant experience can produce resilience.

There is additionally a more personal dimension. Moving from India to the United States for university or work often means entering a highly competitive environment with few guarantees. The professional journey can involve immigration uncertainty, cultural adjustment and the pressure to succeed far from home. It would be impossible to establish from the available evidence that these experiences directly cause stronger leadership. But they could support explain why resilience and willingness to embrace challenges show up so prominently in the ghSMART analysis. The significant point is that this is not simply a story concerning Indians being good at technology. It may be a story regarding a particular combination of technical training, ambition, adaptability and organisational behaviour that happens to match what modern technology businesses increasingly need. Add Now!

(Originally published on Sep 04, 2026). Anil ChakravarthyAdobe CEOBig Tech leadershipshantanu narayenadobe new ceosundar pichaisatya nadella. Anil ChakravarthyAdobe CEOBig Tech leadershipshantanu narayenadobe new ceosundar pichaisatya nadella.

For now, another Indian to head Adobe: Are they better at running Big Tech? Remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.