PayPilot

An AI purchasing agent that turns natural-language shopping intent into policy-controlled PayPal payments with human approval and post-purchase support.

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PayPilot

PayPilot is an AI purchasing agent powered by PayPal. Instead of stopping at product recommendations, it carries the purchase workflow from natural-language intent to a governed payment.

The problem

AI shopping agents can make purchasing fast, but autonomous spending creates a trust problem: users need control over what an agent is allowed to buy and how much it can spend.

The solution

PayPilot combines AI purchasing intelligence with a user spending policy and PayPal checkout.

A user can say:

Find me a programming laptop under $900.

PayPilot:

  1. Understands the purchase intent with AI.
  2. Discovers and compares matching products.
  3. Applies the user's automatic spending limit.
  4. Requires human approval when the purchase exceeds that limit.
  5. Creates a PayPal Sandbox checkout.
  6. Captures the payment after the user completes PayPal approval.
  7. Persists the purchase and notification history.
  8. Provides post-purchase status, tracking, and refund guidance.

For the demonstrated flow, the automatic spending limit is $500. A selected $849 laptop therefore requires explicit approval before PayPal checkout.

Why it matters

The core idea is transaction intelligence, not just shopping intelligence. PayPilot puts a clear policy boundary between an AI recommendation and an actual financial transaction.

PayPal + AI

PayPilot uses the PayPal developer platform's Sandbox Checkout Orders API for OAuth authentication, order creation, approval, and capture. AI is used to interpret purchase requests, build purchasing plans, compare products, and drive the purchasing-agent experience.

Technical implementation

  • React + Vite frontend
  • Node.js + Express API
  • TypeScript
  • PayPal Sandbox Checkout Orders API
  • AI purchasing/reasoning layer with bounded inputs and fallback behavior
  • Spending-policy engine with human approval tokens
  • PostgreSQL persistence
  • Render deployment
  • Automated GitHub Actions verification
  • Security controls including HTTPS validation, request bounds, browser security headers, transaction linkage validation, and duplicate-capture protection

Demo

The hosted application is available at: https://paypilot-m56m.onrender.com/

The public source repository is: https://github.com/peterkehinde673/PayPilot

The demo video shows the working purchase flow through PayPal Sandbox and the resulting persisted purchase history and post-purchase controls.

What makes PayPilot different

Most shopping assistants optimize for finding something to buy. PayPilot focuses on the harder boundary: when an AI agent should be allowed to spend money. The spending policy and explicit approval step make the agent useful without making the user surrender control of the transaction.

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