New AE, old opportunities

Hi everyone, first time poster here. I'm slowly transitioning from a BDR role to AE at a small startup, more out of necessity rather than performance, which has been rocky since I started.

My boss who is also the CEO has tasked me first with trying to go after a bunch of old opps from the AEs who left, most haven't been followed up with in a year or more.

Many of these opps have little info to go off of, so I'm thinking of starting from scratch and just trying to penetrate these accounts as if brand new. For the opps that did have detailed notes, I have been following up with the relevant people and pointing out that previously our teams had been working on a project with the priorities that they had indicated, although it's been crickets in terms of responses.

I was just wondering if there was any general advice this community had for dealing with these sorts of situations. Keep in mind these are not closed lost deals, just deals that never really evolved much (my guess is that since most of the notes aren't helpful, the previous AEs didn't really do thorough discovery).

Thank you!