Oracle's Kay Malcolm: the database is the last line of defense for agent memory

AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-09-15

Kay Malcolm, who runs outbound database product management at Oracle, gave an anatomical talk at AI Engineer: the model is a brain in a jar, the harness is the body, and memory is the central nervous system connecting them.

Her team is split between Europe and the US; Git records what changed but not why. AI made every individual faster without making the team more productive — the missing layer was shared memory.
She distinguishes five kinds of memory: short-term within a session, long-term across sessions, episodic, procedural, and semantic.
On storage, she recounts leaving a job where every specialized database added two standing weekly meetings: relational meant two, document four, graph six.
On stage, four volunteers played relational, document, graph, and vector stores, allowed only to whisper — they couldn't agree on who held the truth, which is the point: agents reconciling four stores often guess wrong and burn tokens.
Her conclusion: consolidate memory in one place, served by a memory broker, as a multiplier for distributed teams.

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Oracle's Kay Malcolm: the database is the last line of defense for agent memory

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