IBM has been making efforts to put Watson to work, and this time, it has grabbed a big -time client from Wall Street. Citigroup, the third largest lender in the US, marks the first financial services client for Watson, analyzing the bank’s customer needs, as well as processing financial, economic and client data for its digital banking efforts. This is made possible by Watson’s ability understand and process natural language, consult whopping volumes of unstructured information, and precisely answer questions because of its humanlike ability to acquire knowledge.

By knuckling down Watson, IBM expects to earn billions by 2015. The AI already has its hands on the healthcare sector, aiding WellPoint Inc. (WLP) and Seton Health Family. IBM believes that Watson’s skills are also well suited in the finance industry, it’s “the next big one for us,” said Manoj Saxena, the one who got Watson its latest gig.

We can recall Watson beating the champions on the quiz show Jeopardy! And with a little training, IBM believes Watson will be able to read and understand 200 million pages in three seconds. This will help financial firms identify risks, rewards and anything else that a human analyst could miss.

Watson was programmed by 25 IBM scientists, and was named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. It’s brain is made up of 200 million pages of information, or one million books, including encyclopedias to reference texts and movie scripts.

Check out our previous roundup on the latest trends in artificial intelligence here. Watson is on the list, as it proves its smarts in a competition solving crossword puzzles. We also have a robot comedian called Data, which can joke the same way standup comedians do, and is able to “improvise.”  There’s David as well, which creates user profiles based on factors provided such as age, interests, knowledge etc.

And the one that got the 2011 best innovation award, DARPA’s Systems of neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program, is hailed the best. Like Watson, it’s developed by IBM as well, dawning the arrival of “new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition.”

But let’s not forget about the ready-made consumer side of AI.  Siri on iPhone 4S took the world by storm and is now embedded into the new models of Mercedes-Benz automobiles. Google is also looking to compete in the world of AI to rival Siri for its mobile platform.