From IIT Kharagpur to Alphabet: Indian-origin CEOs running global companies

Narayen's 2007 start makes him the longest-serving of this group, with about 19 years in the job by the time he hands over. Nadella follows from 2014, then Pichai from 2015, Mehrotra from 2017 and Narasimhan from 2018. Global CEO tenures this long are the exception, which is what makes Adobe's planned handover worth watching.

There's no official list of Indian-origin CEOs, so numbers vary by publication and by who counts. Some lists include division heads such as YouTube's and WhatsApp's, and others don't. The next change is already dated: Chakravarthy takes over on 1 December. Treat every list as a snapshot, because these jobs change hands quickly.

Arvind Krishna, born in West Godavari in Andhra Pradesh, has led IBM since 2020. Sanjay Mehrotra has run memory-chip maker Micron since 2017, a role that matters more than ever during today's memory shortage. Nikesh Arora leads Palo Alto Networks, and Jayshree Ullal leads Arista Networks. Neal Mohan has been CEO of YouTube since 2023.

Leena Nair became Chanel's global CEO in 2022. Vasant Narasimhan has led drugmaker Novartis since 2018. C S Venkatakrishnan is group chief executive of Barclays. Vimal Kapur, a Thapar Institute engineering graduate, has been Honeywell's CEO since June 2023. Raj Subramaniam leads FedEx. Ajay Banga isn't a CEO but runs the World Bank as its president.

Sundar Pichai, an IIT Kharagpur graduate born in Madurai, became Google's CEO in 2015 and Alphabet's in 2019. Satya Nadella, born in Hyderabad, has been Microsoft's CEO since 2014 and is also its chairman. Together, they've led two of the world's best-known technology companies for more than a decade.

Adobe announced in September that Anil Chakravarthy will become president and CEO on 1 December 2026. He succeeds Shantanu Narayen, CEO since 2007, who becomes executive chair. Chakravarthy holds a B.Tech from IIT (BHU), Varanasi, and a PhD from MIT. He joined Adobe in January 2020 after running Informatica.

Chakravarthy isn't this year's only new name. Shailesh Jejurikar, born in Mumbai, became CEO of Procter & Gamble in January. Asha Sharma was named chief executive of Microsoft's gaming business in February. In June, Meta named CRED founder Kunal Shah the global head of WhatsApp, alongside a $900 million investment in CRED. Shah's title is head, not CEO.