> IBM is generally considered the leader

You must not talk to competent people. IBM is very experienced at this grift. I remember when I used to go to conferences in a different field and IBM would announce "state of the art" results that were very obviously done by cheating (making an ensemble model and tuning the weights on the test set). Everyone doing real work would ignore them, and then they'd go sell to clueless midcap companies on the basis of that announcement.

It's not that the cheating stayed with IBM: Ray Dalio hired David Ferrucci out of Watson to try to make an AI for Bridgewater. The pitch was to make it a very accurate people assesor, but in practice the goal was to tell you who agreed the most with Ray Dalio. The team spent years of their lives taking Bridgewater's money, building basically linear regression on questionnaires, and calling it advanced AI on interviews. It's all documented in The Fund.

I don’t understand why IBM never tried to make amends and reclaim their former credibility somehow.

Do IBM decison makers intentionally want to have that hang over the whole firm and be the butt of jokes?

I now work in an I.T dept of a financial company in U.S and I've also worked at software companies in India.

They are all sweatshops these days.