The way the AI behaves is mainly dependant on whether its an Aggressor, Fortifier, Economist -or Researcher AI type. The Aggressor is for example the most likely AI type to build lots of ships, while the Economist would most ikely invest less in military support. If you play with the AI type set to random you will not be able to tell what kind of AI types you play against at the start of a game. That's most likely the reason you saw the AI behave very different each time you played the game.

The thing with the scouts should be fixed regardless of what AI type you played with / against though. It happened to me a few times as well, and has to do with the enemy deploying huge amounts of mines in their gravity wells. The AI tries to counter that by spamming scout frigates like there is no tomorrow. This behavior should be tied down a notch.

I noticed the same, the AI build to many scouts and anti structure cruisers.

As noticed by someone in another thread a few weeks ago, the economic AI surprisingly seems to be the only one who plays half decent at the moment.
The other ones have weak fleet compositions and generally build too few ships, especially when they try to rush a Titan at times i wouldn't even think about doing that and so all their income is wasted there.

But since that hint i tried the econ AI more often and the results are much better.
Today i had a game where it properly distracted me with what i thought was it's main fleet to deploy another two healthy fleets elsewhere at the same time and even built the correct counters to my composition..... i've got so used to the agressive beta AI (which i always chose before thinking that this would be the most of a challenge), that this allowedly basic ruse almost did the job.

But on average, yes, the AI needs a healthy amount of work until June .