IBM’s Watson, a supercomputer designed for artificial intelligence, isn’t just good at answering Jeopardy questions — it’s also smart at diagnostic medicine and creating new recipes.

A new report from the New York Times today shows that IBM is looking to bring Watson’s powerful abilities to more industries in order to give the company an edge in the “big data” field. Watson has already had some success as a diagnostic assistant at a few medical centers around the country, including the Cleveland Clinic. Now IBM is looking to use its powerhouse elsewhere.

New Watson projects will include helping people come up with recipes, assisting in the development of new pharmaceutical drugs, and predicting when industrial machines will need maintenance.

Watson could be helpful to so many industries because it is able to sift through crazy amounts of data and make intelligent decisions about what to do with that information. Watson can look through Web pages, social networks, medical images, patent filings, and more to find what it needs.

IBM’s footprint in big data will only grow larger if it succeeds with placing Watson in commercial spaces. The company claims it is already doing data and analytics work for more than 10,000 customers. It employs 400 mathematicians and 9,000 analytics experts to do its bidding.

If IBM continues its investments it big data, it predicts that revenue generated in the area will hit $16 billion by 2015. Watson specifically isn’t making the company big money yet, but IBM believes they will pay off down the road.

Check out the video below to see Watson diagnose a patient and suggest treatment options.

That means a patient could walk into a hospital and tell the computer about what is bothering them — whether it’s leg pain or a cough or a sore throat — and Watson can quickly process that information and spit out a diagnosis that has the highest probability of being correct. For most cases, that would save hospitals a lot of time because the computer could plow through the large number of cases hospitals regularly contend with that require simple treatments.

Watson was able to diagnose an eye problem with a fictional victim that had a 73 percent chance of being correct, according to a report by the Associated Press. Watson was able to improve the chance that its diagnosis was correct as it was given more symptoms and more clues about the patient’s condition and eventually arrived at a diagnosis of Lyme disease. Watson can also pull information from blogs and other media sources to create a more accurate diagnosis.

Watson is best known for crushing the puny likes of Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a series of games. It’s an advanced supercomputer that does a very good job of understanding human language and searching for correct answers. But the supercomputer was no match for former physicist and New Jersey congressman Rush Holt, who beat the computer by edging it out in a few areas that required clever use of language and rhymes like “Hoover’s Maneuvers.”

At its core, Watson is a computer that uses a series of complex search algorithms and some heavy-duty processing firepower to determine an answer that has the highest probability of being correct. But while it has a good bit of “buzzer mojo” that contributed to its wins over Jeopardy! champions Jennings and Rutter, it still hasn’t cracked the code for perfect natural language processing — something that comes easily to humans but can be incredibly difficult for computers.

IBM said it would be at least two years before the supercomputer made it to hospitals as an official product and said it didn’t have any kind of price tags for hospitals just yet.

Surprisingly, the win had nothing to do with Holt’s physics background — just a little bit of scrappy play in categories where the human brain has a slight edge over a supercomputer. Holt, an assistant director of the plasma physics laboratory at Princeton University until he was elected in 1998, managed to outmaneuver Watson in some key categories that showcased the computer’s weaknesses. That included the likes of “presidential rhymes,” which required certain responses like “Hoover’s Maneuvers.”

Watson has shown just how far computing has come today after handily crushing the likes of Jennings and Rutter. But, at its core, it is still a computer that uses a series of complex search algorithms and some heavy-duty processing firepower to determine an answer that has the highest probability of being correct. That’s because using a series of algorithms to understand natural language — something that comes to humans with relative ease — can be incredibly difficult for computers.

Jennings said it was Watson’s “buzzer mojo” — how quickly the computer was able to hit the buzzer to indicate that it would answer the question — that led the computer to victory over he and Rutter. He made the comments on an ask-me-anything thread — which lets users ask the original poster questions through comments and get responses within the thread — on news-aggregation site Reddit. (The thread is also worth checking out because some of Jennings’ comments are pure gold.)

“Every night, all three contestants passed a very hard test to be there. Ergo, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers nearly all the time,” Jennings said. “So it just comes down to buzzer mojo. Which is why Watson won so handily … pretty hard to have better response time than a circuit board.”

Holt finished the first round of Jeopardy! last week with 8,600 points to Watson’s 6,200. It wasn’t the first time humanity handed Watson a loss — the computer only won 71 percent of its warm-up matches. But it was the first time since IBM’s highly-publicized campaign that featured the supercomputer’s nationally-televised appearance when it went toe-to-toe and soundly defeated Jeopardy! champions Jennings and Rutter. It was also only a single round — not a full Jeopardy! match.