Citi Trends expands AI to MFP with invent.ai for better retail planning

PHILADELPHIA — July 16, 2025 — Invent.ai, an award-winning global retail planning solutions provider, and Citi Trends, a leading value-priced retailer of apparel, accessories and home goods, announces the expansion of their ongoing partnership. After successfully integrating invent.ai’s AI-driven inventory allocation and replenishment solutions, Citi Trends is now broadening its use of invent.ai AI technology to include Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP). This move follows the success of invent.ai’s AI-driven inventory optimization, which has already delivered impressive results, improving planner efficiency, retail stock availability and overall financial performance.

Since implementing invent.ai’s Ai-decisioning platform earlier this year, Citi Trends has achieved measurable improvements in stock availability, operational efficiency and revenue across its nearly 600 stores and two distribution centers. 

Highlights of early results include: 

• Stock improvements: Increased in-stock rates by nearly 6%, meaning fewer empty shelves and happier shoppers
• Revenue growth: More products available to customers resulting in tens of millions in additional sales 
• Time and cost savings: Over 60% of manual inventory planning tasks automated
• Improved product placement: AI-driven decisions on where to allocate stock based on real-time demand
• Large-scale execution: Optimized nearly 4 million units of inventory, representing millions in merchandise value

By adopting invent.ai’s MFP module, Citi Trends is bridging strategic financial planning with real-time execution. This next phase will enable more accurate budgeting, open-to-buy forecasting and retail plan alignment across categories—enhancing both financial planning discipline and merchandising agility. 

 “I am pleased to expand our AI-driven approach to instill best practices within Citi Trends using invent.ai to grow our business and enhance our customer experience,” said David Charmatz, Citi Trends VP of IT.

“Citi Trends is proving what’s possible with connected AI,” said Gurhan Kok, Founder & CEO of invent.ai. “Their expansion into MFP connects vision with action and we’re seeing real results: higher sales, leaner costs and better, faster AI-decisioning. This is the future of retail merchandising.”

Looking ahead, the companies will expand enterprise-wide AI, integrating features like cross-docking optimization, SKU-level financial planning and automatic detections of phantom inventory to meet customer expectations and retail savings goals.

Learn more about how leading retailers are leveraging invent.ai’s AI-powered solutions: www.invent.ai/case-studies/

About Citi Trends

Citi Trends is a leading specialty value retailer of apparel, accessories and home trends for way less spend primarily for African American and multicultural families in the United States. The Company operates 598 stores located in 33 states. For more information, visit www.cititrends.com or your local store.

About invent.ai

Invent.ai is a pioneering AI-decisioning platform that gives retailers superpowers to make the best planning and operational decisions to grow sales, revenue and margin dollars. Delivering fast, measurable value through its technology solutions, invent.ai brings together retail planning data, predicts outcomes, and optimizes inventory, pricing and merchandising.