Political bots are automated accounts, sometimes found on social media, sometimes found on Instagram, sometimes found on Twitter, sometimes found in instant messaging apps. There's a bunch of different places where political bots are interacting.
There are other kinds of bots that make use of digital data to do things like make sure Wikipedia is up to date. There are different kinds of bots, but typically when I'm talking about political bots I mean these ones that are interacting with humans. They are mimicking humans in some way. The people creating those bots may have a lot of technical skill. They may be computer scientists and developers. They could also be people using tools that have been developed by some other developer to quickly create bots. You don't necessarily need to have a lot of technical skill to get a bot up and running.
We also need to remember that there are entire companies—in fact, an industry—built around the idea of search engine optimization that uses some of these techniques and could make use of a bot network they created. For example, there could be a whole bunch of bots they create say on Twitter to all interact with each other to amplify a message. There would be an organization potentially behind the development of those bots, and you can trickle down, as my colleague was explaining, to the specific person who was the original writer of the code.