Monday, March 23, 2026

Adobe’s CFO is using AI to answer 300,000 emails, cut contract review in half — and make sure finance never slows the company down

Good morning. Adobe CFO Dan Durn isn’t waiting to see how agentic AI plays out—he’s already running the experiment inside his own finance organization.

Durn, who oversees finance, technology, security, and operations, has turned Adobe’s back office into a live proving ground for autonomous AI agents. The results include contract review time cut in half, more than 300,000 emails auto-responded to in a single year, and finance teams surfacing investor insights in minutes instead of hours.

At Adobe (No. 201 on the Fortune 500), the push is deliberate. If finance doesn’t adopt AI, it risks becoming a “rate limiter of growth”—a back-office bottleneck in a company moving fast on product innovation, Durn told me. Inside finance, he breaks AI deployment into three buckets. For a closer look at how Adobe’s finance chief is rewiring the function, and what it signals for CFOs navigating the same pressure, read more of my interview with Durn here.

The rise of AI is also rapidly reshaping corporate leadership. Even long-tenured leaders face increasing pressure from investors to move aggressively on AI. Recent leadership changes, including the announced retirement of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, highlight how little patience markets now have for perceived hesitation. At the same time, Adobe reported that annualized revenue from its AI-first products more than tripled year over year in its first quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended Feb. 27.

The make-or-break moment for CEOs is contributing to an era of rapid turnover among chief executives, Fortune’s Claire Zillman writes. In 2025, companies in the S&P 1500 named 168 new CEOs, the highest total in more than 15 years, according to Spencer Stuart, a global executive search and leadership advisory firm.

“CEO tenures are getting shorter and fewer incoming chief executives have prior CEO experience, the data shows, making the two-time CEO exceedingly rare,” Zillman writes. “All told, corporate America has turned into a CEO meat-grinder; it’s chewing up and spitting out leaders at a pace not seen in a decade and a half.” You can read more here.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Craig Abolt was appointed CFO of GSTV, a national on-the-go video network. A career CFO, Abolt has experience across both high-growth startups and global enterprises. Most recently, he was CFO at Real Chemistry. Previously, he served as CFO at Intersection/CityBridge, and held CFO roles at Titan, Covanta Holding Corporation, and DIRECTV Latin America. At GSTV, Abolt will lead the company’s financial strategy and operations to drive long-term value creation.

Kevan Krysler was appointed CFO of Carbon Robotics. Krysler bring nearly 30 years of experience. Most recently, he served as CFO at Everpure (formerly Pure Storage, PSTG). Before that, Krysler held a senior finance executive role at VMware and served as a partner at KPMG. He joins Carbon Robotics as the company reached a $100 million annual revenue milestone.

Big Deal

"As AI enters a new phase, CFOs gather useful intelligence" is a new CFO Insights report released by Deloitte. Finance chiefs are now helping drive an organization-wide AI initiative, and this edition explores what finance leaders have learned so far.

With the rise in AI investment, finance leaders "come face-to-face with the difficulty of calculating a return," according to the report. "Some of AI’s benefits can be hard to measure, while the technology evolves at a speed which can outstrip metrics."

Going deeper

"Will LLMs Replace Coders? Not Entirely" is a new article in Wharton School’s business journal. After ChatGPT’s launch, the percentage of routine coding questions on the popular online forum Stack Overflow appears to have shifted to AI tools. However, more novel problems still require human expertise, new research by Neha Sharma finds.

“When people talk about large language models (LLMs) replacing humans, it wasn’t clear to us what space would remain for people,” Sharma said. “What we find is that the space that remains is where problems haven’t been solved before.”