Three things break in production AI memory that never show up in demos:

A user updates a preference. The old one keeps winning retrieval. You can't tell why without reading every stored memory manually. A sarcastic comment gets stored as a literal preference. Six months later the agent is still acting on it. No way to find it without a full audit. A derived summary outlives the facts that made it true. Retrieval surfaces it confidently. The source is long gone. All three are the same problem: the memory layer is a black box. No provenance, no confidence scores, no superseded-by pointers. The AI memory industry has a black-box problem. And the category is still optimizing for 'does it remember things' instead of 'can you fix it when it's wrong.