When an AI work assistant cannot finish a task, what should it leave behind?

ChatGPT Work is part of a wider push to let assistants take on multi-step jobs across email, calendars, documents and other work apps. That makes the quiet failure more important: it hits an access problem, an ambiguous date or a missing record, then keeps blinking ‘working’ while somebody else waits. A decent handoff says what it changed, what it could not reach, whether it will retry, and whether the next move is actually mine. Otherwise ‘in progress’ is just a polite way to make a person babysit the software. What should an AI work assistant leave behind when it cannot finish a task?