To me this is an indictment of the leadership style of the day of charging in, laying everyone off, then putting you on an AI death march project. That just destroys institutional knowledge, your credibility as a leader, while inevitably the project fails (and few on the team believed in it anyway).

Sure this type of leadership can work in limited short term circumstances where you have a very clear and meaningful objective. But if you can’t quickly get the team itself to believe in the project - and make it THEIR project not YOUR project - you’re going to fail.