Conversation memory is the layer that persists information about the caller across interactions. Last time they called the dog was sick; this time the agent asks how the dog is doing. Last booking they preferred the morning slot; this time the agent offers mornings first.
Done well, memory is what makes an AI agent feel like the regular receptionist rather than a stranger. Done badly, it is creepy or wrong, the agent volunteers private information at the wrong moment, or misattributes a prior interaction to the wrong customer.
The architecture choices are real. Memory can live in the CRM (the agent reads the customer record and uses it as context), in a vendor-controlled store (faster lookups, harder to migrate), or in both. The right pattern for an SME is CRM-as-memory, the customer record is the canonical store, the agent reads from it natively, and any vendor-side caching is a transient acceleration, not a parallel source of truth.
Vorel memory lives in your CRM. The agent reads from Salesforce, Epic, ServiceTitan, or whichever system holds the customer record, and writes the new interaction back. There is no second memory store to drift out of sync.