## 2 Literature Review
Such a concept includes technologies such as: artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, software robots, cybersecurity (which currently has a strong echo due to the social conditions generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and favorable technical conditions), accessibility of technology, and very good speed of communications on the Internet. For the topic of analysis, artificial intelligence and software robots play a key role due to the facilities offered by accounting data processing algorithms. Artificial intelligence [56; 62] is a generic concept that refers to systems that copy human intelligence to perform various activities in work processes and that can be continuously improved based on the information they gather in each work stage. The central concept of artificial intelligence systems is to copy and then surpass the way people perceive and interact with the world. Artificial intelligence [63; 64] has three areas of action: description, prediction, and prescription. The three fields of action can be described as follows: the description represents the knowledge/understanding of the researched data (what happened), the purpose of the prediction is the use of historical information to decipher the future (what will happen), and the purpose of the prescription is to get the best results (what needs to happen). In relation to these three fields of action of artificial intelligence, Figure 1 is elaborated, in which the specific elements of artificial intelligence and the financial-accounting system within the economic operators are superimposed. Analyzing Figure 1 it can be seen that both financial and management accounting, but especially managerial control, fully benefit from the possibility of applying artificial intelligence algorithms that aim at a better understanding and use of data in the information-accounting system. The link between accounting and managerial control is much better exploited by such technologies due to the fact that the information provided by the first component can be analyzed in detail by algorithms provided by artificial intelligence, resulting in information essential to consolidate/support managerial decision. The topicality of the research topic can be appreciated by the interest shown in the scientific, academic, and research environment for the concepts of Cloud Accounting, Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, and their connection with the field of accounting. An online search found scientific articles indexed in international databases (Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus) and in the Google Scholar semantic search engine. Only articles with the following search title, abstract, or keywords were analyzed: \"Account OR accounting & profession OR accounting & industry * (Topic) and artificial & intelligence OR RPA OR big & data OR emerging & technologist * OR digital * (Topic)\"  
The text mining analysis performed with the support of the bibliometric package within the statistical modeling application R highlights the following diagram of the links between the components that make up emerging technologies (artificial intelligence, software robots, Internet of Things, cybersecurity, etc.). Figure 2 highlights the keywords that frequently appear in articles that match the database query phrase. All the elements that we intuited to be related to the cloud accounting field are found in the previous image: big data, machine learning, internet of things, artificial intelligence, etc. An in-depth analysis focusing on the emerging information technologies can be seen in Figure 3, which shows the relationships between information technologies (artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain) and the accounting services industry. Figure 1: Fields of action, scope, and specific AI algorithms (adaptation from [64]).