Adobe president Anil Chakravarthy on customer experience orchestration, the SEMrush close, and competing in the AI creative tools era

Adobe's Anil Chakravarthy on AI, SEMrush, and the customer experience bet

Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe's Digital Experience business, is making a straightforward argument: the next growth vector for Adobe isn't selling more creative tools, it's owning the workflow that connects brand assets to marketing execution at scale. He calls it customer experience orchestration.

Digital twins and the HP example

The clearest illustration is what Adobe is doing with HP. HP produces 15,000 new SKUs annually, and historically, marketing teams would commission photo shoots separately from the engineering-side CAD files used in manufacturing. Adobe's pitch is to collapse that gap: start from the 3D source file, build a digital twin, and then generate all marketing imagery, backgrounds, regional variations, and translated assets directly from that single source of truth. Brand guidelines and accumulated institutional knowledge about what makes an ad perform get encoded into what Chakravarthy calls Adobe Brand Intelligence, so the output is high-fidelity and brand-consistent without requiring manual intervention at each step. Nvidia is a partner in this workflow.

“We just announced that we have received all the regulatory approvals for SEMRush. We are in the waiting period to close it. And marketers have no idea how this whole thing works — they don't know what happens when you put in a prompt into chat GPT, what queries get kicked off, how that information is assembled, how it impacts their brand.”

SEMrush and the GEO opportunity

Adobe has received all regulatory approvals for its SEMrush acquisition and expects to close within weeks. The strategic logic is search-engine-optimization thinking applied to AI answer engines. Chakravarthy says enterprise marketers are genuinely lost on how to manage their brand presence in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. They don't know what consumers are prompting for, how those queries get resolved, or what Adobe or SEMrush can do to ensure their brand shows up accurately. SEMrush plugs that gap with existing distribution and data. Chakravarthy is blunt that he expects the competitive battle between SEMrush and upstarts like Profound to be "over pretty soon."

The $25B buyback and the AI-victim narrative

The $25 billion share buyback announced this week is a direct response to market skepticism that Adobe is more AI victim than AI beneficiary. Chakravarthy frames it as a confidence signal: the business will remain highly profitable, and management is willing to back that with capital. On what changes the narrative in results, he points to sustained double-digit revenue growth and healthy margins as the floor, with customer experience orchestration as the potential inflection point above that.

Video and the tools gap

On video, Chakravarthy acknowledges the workflow is nowhere near what exists in the image space. Adobe has announced over 30 integrations with third-party video models including Runway, Flux, Google Veo, and others, and frames the strategy as deliberately open rather than vertically integrated. The theory is that Brand Intelligence handles the opinionated layer, telling creatives where to let AI run and where to take manual control, while the underlying model is interchangeable.

The harder problem is tool-level automation. Fully AI-generated video arrived before anyone built a reliable agent that can puppeteer Premiere Pro, sync cuts to music, or make edits on existing footage without regenerating entire sequences. That gap is real and unresolved. The post-interview commentary makes the competitive pressure concrete: image generation has already reached the point where casual users say they no longer need Photoshop or a Fiverr contractor for product photography. The same trajectory toward video is visible, but the timeline is unclear and the inference latency problem for long-form content remains unsolved.