The most common approaches for branded company podcasts in tech fall in two categories - a company exec interviewing other business leaders in the category, or the company sponsoring a narrative show about overlapping themes. I’ll cover one of each this week.

First up is Lenovo:

Life with Machines

They take the sponsorship approach, with financial support for the show, and relatively lightweight branding. Host Baratunde Thurston has a range of writing, TV, and podcast endeavors (notably How to Citizen). And the show focuses on the policy and education side of AI, not just tech and business strategy. It hits a nice sweet spot of expertise and inquisitiveness, and tries out some interesting touches. There’s an AI co-host that has a chance to throw in its own questions based on the interview transcript. The episode I listened to also blended together an original and follow-up conversation with the guest - that’s an interesting way to have an element of further reflection and evolution of the conversation that I really liked.