Want to tap into the artificial intelligence (AI) power of IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson supercomputer? In the age of the cloud, there’s only one way: Watson-as-a-Service.

“#IBMWatson is ONLY available as a service…,” IBM said on its @IBMWatson Twitter page in reply to questions following a live chat on Twitter about Watson’s next acts. IBM also said there was no current use cases for Watson-as-a-Service (WaaS), a term IBM is already using.

So what’s next for Watson? IBM said it was “a client-driven initiative. IBM pushes it in directions our clients need.” Wired Enterprise’s Robert McMillan reports Watson has been hitting the books, first in finance and most recently in medicine:

Last week, IBM said that it was working with Citi to “explore how the Watson technology could help improve and simplify the banking experience,” but for the past six months, Big Blue has also teamed up with health insurer WellPoint to turn Watson into a machine that can support the doctors of the world.

While that may sound like a lot for the new student, let’s not forget Watson is a fast learner. “[Watson] is best suited for use cases involving critical decision making based on large volumes of unstructured data,” IBM said on its Watson Twitter page. To drive the Big Data-crunching message home, @IBMWatson noted that “90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. And 80% of that data is unstructured.” On finance: “Five new research documents come out of Wall Street every minute.” Medicine: “Medical information is doubling every 5 years.”

That’s a lot of data. So will Watson be the Big Daddy of Big Data? Watson-as-a-Service will be delivered as a private or hybrid cloud service, IBM says. Watson will be a sort of in-house clone, given that WaaS needs access to lots of data, which in medicine and finance is usually private. So what does that look like?

While IBM will not say much about its Citi deal, the companies said the plan was to build “the first consumer banking applications.” WellPoint is more forthcoming, McMillan reports, noting that in December, the health insurer said that it was working with Cedars-Sinai Hospital’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute to help physicians treat cancer patients.

“Cedars-Sinai’s oncology experts will help develop recommendations on appropriate clinical content for the WellPoint health care solutions. They will also assist in the evaluation and testing of the specific tools that WellPoint plans to develop for the oncology field utilizing IBM’s Watson technology,” WellPoint said in a statement. “The Cedars-Sinai cancer experts will enter hypothetical patient scenarios, evaluate the proposed treatment options generated by IBM Watson, and provide guidance on how to improve the content and utility of the treatment options provided to the physicians.”

But that will take time to ramp up, McMillan reports:

WellPoint says its medical learning application is still a year away. [David Gondek, a scientist with IBM who has worked on Watson for the past five years] and the IBM researchers are putting Watson through its own machine learning bootcamp. “It’s a little like sending Watson to medical school. We don’t just push a button and instantly Watson can offer medical advice,” Gondek says. “We need experts to show us what’s important in the domain. We need experts to come up with test scenarios that Watson can learn from.”

If Watson can be trained to win at a quiz show such as Jeopardy!, it seems it all comes down to how the data and training as to how effective it is. Have your say: Is Watson-as-a-Service just what the doctor ordered? Where do you see Watson’s Big Data-crunching power plugging in next?

Note: IBM just posted a full recap of Friday’s Cloudchat, “IBM Watson and cloud.”