In December 1997, Mikel Amigot began sending friends his observations about the internet. The messages acquired a name, La Brújula Digital: the digital compass. By late 1999, the venture had become iBrújula.com, with roughly 79,000 subscribers. It was an agreeable outcome for an email habit. Most people who forward things to their friends merely lose a few friends.
Today, Amigot is the founder and CEO of ibl.ai, a New York company building AI infrastructure, and the founder and editor-in-chief of IBL News. Between those roles lies a career that can look restless on paper: financial journalism, books, internet publishing, video, learning platforms, artificial intelligence. Follow the work rather than the job titles, though, and a recognizable subject emerges. He keeps finding new ways for knowledge to reach people.
His latest proposal reaches into the university itself. In his 2026 book, The AI-Native University, Amigot asks what an institution designed around the existence of AI would look like. It is a substantial question from someone whose first digital audience consisted of acquaintances checking their inboxes.
The compass came after the newsroom
Amigot was born in Pamplona in 1964 and studied at the University of Navarra. His early career included Euskadi Irratia, followed by a move to Madrid in 1987 and an internship at the financial newspaper Expansión. Work at Dinero and other publications followed. Before he was building platforms, he was working inside the institutions that decided which information deserved a platform.
He also wrote books. Neguri, published in 1990, sits in the bibliographical record alongside his name. His background included teaching advertising at ICADE and work in marketing. The eventual internet entrepreneur had already occupied several positions along the route between making information and finding an audience for it.
In a 1999 interview, he traced his fascination with the internet to 1995 and the formation of his company, IMSSA, to 1996. The newsletter followed. Its early growth offers a useful corrective to the polished origin story: the audience came through a small publishing operation, without an advertising campaign to manufacture its arrival.
A compass is a fitting name for a publication about an unfamiliar medium. It promises orientation. It also admits, with rather more honesty than most technology branding, that its readers might be lost.
A local channel, a distant audience
Amigot moved to the United States in 2003. His multimedia work connected New York with Spain and audiences who wanted information in Spanish. The geographical move enlarged the practical problem he was working on: how to serve people whose interests and language did not fit neatly inside a national broadcasting boundary.
In 2007, he and the Pamplona production company Tagomedia introduced NavarraTV.com in New York. The project made local television available online, on demand. It carried material from three Navarra broadcasters and allowed viewers to contribute videos. Juan Ignacio Tabar, Miguel Sanz and Amigot appeared together at the launch.
The appeal was pleasantly concrete. Someone far from Navarra could watch familiar programming; someone nearby, outside a broadcaster’s reception area, could watch it too. Distance and reception were different obstacles with the same online remedy. Television was becoming something a viewer could request, rather than an appointment the viewer had to keep.
His work also included helping New York’s Eusko Etxea build its website. In 2004, he described that project as a way to present Basque people more fully to the wider world. The institution’s physical address mattered less once its information could travel. A local association could retain its character while becoming easier for outsiders to discover.
The editor watches the language change
Amigot was thinking about the medium in public as well as building businesses around it. A 2004 conference presentation examined digital news media in the United States. In 2007, he presented a paper at the International Congress of the Spanish Language in Cartagena, asking whether internet language was a language of its own.
The paper considered immediacy, precision, interaction and the ways people adjusted their writing to different online settings. It moved from formal communication to chats and emoticons. There is something endearing about a future AI executive pausing to consider the grammatical life of a smiley face.
The larger concern was how people made themselves understood when the machinery of communication changed. A commercial email and a message to a friend called for different registers. The medium carried both. Technology could alter the speed and form of an exchange without making its human setting disappear.
That attention to context offers a useful way to read his later career. A piece of software enters an existing community, with its own language and expectations. Getting the machinery to run is one task. Making it intelligible to the people expected to use it is another.
Some infrastructure comes with a camera
IBL’s education work brought software engineering together with course production. IBL specialized in Open edX after the platform’s release in 2013, then built its own platform on that foundation. Its clients included universities and organizations developing corporate training programs.
A particularly revealing detail appears in July 2022. Amigot was nominated for the Open edX Core Contributor Program, with work involving how-to videos, marketing materials and conference press coverage. The nomination discussion distinguished his contribution from Miguel Amigot’s proposed coding work. The names were similar; the responsibilities required some clarification.
The distinction helps explain Mikel’s place in the enterprise. Open software benefits from people who can explain how to use it, document its possibilities and report on the community around it. A tutorial can look modest beside an architecture diagram. For someone trying to get started, it may be the more useful object.
His educational writing also addressed the person who has little time to return to school. In an opinion piece, he argued for repeated, manageable periods of online learning over a working life. He reached for a familiar consumer comparison:
“We will subscribe to college like we access Netflix or Amazon Prime.”
Mikel Amigot, writing on lifelong learning
The analogy is jaunty; the underlying concern is practical. A working adult needs an educational arrangement that can accommodate work. The course catalogue may be impressive, but the calendar still gets a vote.
Who gets the keys?
At ibl.ai, Amigot leads strategy, partnerships and media. The company describes itself as family-owned and operated. Its leadership includes Miguel Amigot as chief technology officer, Blanca Amigot in finance and Jaione Amigot in engineering management. Mikel’s editorial work continues alongside the business.
The company’s current proposition centers on control. Organizations can run its AI platform within their own infrastructure, retain code and data, and choose among language models. Its commercial approach includes alternatives to charging for every individual seat. These are company propositions, to be evaluated in the details of a deployment, rather than a promise that adopting AI automatically produces a better institution.
Three things to keep within reach
An editorial guide to the control questions behind ibl.ai’s stated approach.
For an institution, those choices affect what happens after the demonstration: who maintains the system, who can alter it and how difficult it becomes to leave. Amigot’s business puts those questions inside the product conversation. Ownership becomes an operational matter, with consequences that last longer than the excitement of trying a new tool.
The university, reconsidered
The AI-Native University: Blueprint for the Institution of the Future brings his institutional argument into book form. Published in 2026 and available free online, it contains twenty chapters and seven appendices. Its scope includes learning, faculty roles, administration, governance and a roadmap for implementation.
In the preface, he argues that a university should consider how AI changes its design, beyond adding isolated applications. Faculty remain central as mentors and scholars. Student support, research and administrative work become connected parts of the redesign. The ambition is institutional, which makes it a proposal about leadership as much as software.
His author biography describes a desire to preserve human relationships, curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge while using AI responsibly. That ambition supplies a standard against which the technology can be judged. A faster process deserves scrutiny if the experience becomes worse for the people passing through it.
He continues to report from the education technology world, including a July 2026 dispatch from InstructureCon in Louisville. The founder still carries an editor’s assignment. It gives his public career an unusual continuity: he participates in the market while continuing to describe the conversations taking place around it.
Another audience, every evening
There is also the Rosary Network, the Catholic initiative Amigot co-founded with María Blanca in 2020. Its daily prayer reaches people through audio and video, including YouTube. It adds a personal commitment to a public life otherwise described in the language of platforms and institutions.
The network’s stated purpose is devotional. Its invitation does not require a donation. Here, too, a digital format gathers people who may be far apart, although the reason for gathering differs from a university course or a news publication.
Across these projects, Amigot has kept working on the relationship between a message, its medium and the person receiving it. The compass, the local television channel, the learning platform and the daily prayer each offer a different answer. The university is his latest subject. The question of how to reach someone has been with him much longer.