“The pace of the telecoms industry frustrates me,” said Liz Parry, CEO of Lifecycle, while we were in a meeting room in Barcelona. “It’s bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake sometimes.”
Parry, a seasoned professional, has already experienced a few things in telecoms. Some, such as bureaucracy, she would prefer to see in the past.
“We still have people saying to us, ‘Are you 5G compliant? Do your systems work with 5G?’ Yes, but they pretty much always have because it wasn’t complicated for us to upgrade the platform to work with 5G. I think sometimes we build complexity inadvertently just by having conversations around things that people don’t fully understand.”
Her honesty comes from frustration, she says. The frustration of knowing that the telecoms industry could be delivering much better solutions if it pursued simplicity.
Something similar may be happening now with the topic of the hour: AI.
According to Parry, Lifecycle uses artificial intelligence in its business processes and sees huge benefits in implementing such technologies. But there’s a good dose of uncertainty that makes clients reluctant.
“When we’ve had conversations with our customers around appetite for building AI into our platform, they’ve asked us not to. They don’t have policies that can deal with it, so they are very nervous about customer information, how the data is going to be shared, how we might process it,” she explained in an interview during MWC 25.
“Obviously, we’ve got all of our legal agreements in place, but there’s nervousness. People don’t understand the technology well enough, and it just feels a bit like the Wild West.”
Statistics seem to corroborate this feeling. A KPMG study published in 2023 showed that 61% of respondents were wary of trusting AI systems, and 67% reported low to moderate acceptance of AI.
However, “Different geographical regions have different reactions to AI,” Parry pointed out. “If you go to Asia or LATAM, they’re interested in the customer segmentation and hyper-personalization aspects, which you don’t see as much of in the UK and Europe, for example. There are different ways of approaching it, which might be a bit cultural, I think.”
Indeed, Edelman’s 2025 AI Trust Barometer shows that companies in countries such as the United States, France, Germany, Canada, and others are less likely to trust AI.
On the other hand, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and China have the highest trust rate, according to the Edelman report.
So, where does that leave us today? “I’m a big believer in integrity, and this kind of smoke and mirrors game makes me quite uncomfortable,” Parry said. “So, if we’re going to deliver something, it’ll be real, no vaporware, no game playing. It is what it is.”
Same Mistakes With 6G?
In January, the Lifecycle CEO published a guest post at TelcoForge outlining avenues to bridge the gap between the 6G vision and reality. While the company is focusing more on 5G now, the future is a real concern for her.
“I’m anticipating that this [the slow pace of industry] is exactly the same thing that is going to happen [with 6G].”
Her approach to preventing this troubled scenario has been to start serious conversations around potential 6G building blocks. One of them is network slicing.
“That hasn’t taken off, but we are really interested. We had a couple of partners who were interested in driving private 5G private networks forward. But there’s been no appetite [for now].”
Another one is education in telecoms, especially at a moment when Lifecycle has entered a new era in its history. “We’ve been around for a long time. We’ve got lots of people in the business who […] don’t know anything about telco. And they don’t want to. They just want it to work. So we’re also doing some of that education around how it all works and then looking at the marketing consultancy as well.”
With so much technology in place today and much more already in the making, Parry left me with one last piece of wisdom. Perhaps one of the most important ones. “You still need people to run the business.”
Simple as that.
