Hsiao convinced the board that Walgreens could become a cutting-edge AI company. It was a misguided effort: WBA is nowhere close to being able to do that for several reasons, and has more fundamental problems to solve anyway. But he managed to convince them, and WBA hired a bunch of skilled, earnest AI practitioners.
After Hsiao was fired the torch passed to Sheida. In fairness her mandate to "bring AI to Walgreens" was doomed, but she made things even worse; her leadership was absent/incompetent, and if she has any actual technical knowledge she never showed it. She haphazardly threw the AI people on random projects that were unrelated to their actual skills. And she would name-drop "Generative AI" in all the stupidest contexts; it was so cringe-worthy.
Eventually leadership figured out that they had a bunch of expensive AI people getting nothing done and called for layoffs. And maybe they were right to do that; Walgreens is not capable of doing AI work. But it seems they just trusted Sheida about who should be laid off, rather than making any effort to keep good people or find reasonable projects. There fired the good along with the bad, mostly people who had been there less than a year, and gave everybody a nice big black mark on their resume.
It seems to me that WBA uses the idea that "we are a pharmacy, saving lives and doing good" to paper over the fact that they are a really sh---y company. Especially to employees who had the naivete to try to improve things, rather than just cynically covering their own a-s.