Switching teams vs AI

A very noob question I fear.  I occasionally play SINS against the AI and enjoy it a great deal.  Sometimes just for fun I'll switch teams when loading a saved game to play as the other side for a while.  My question is, when you switch which team you manually control, does the AI efficiently take over the other side?  As in producing ships, mounting attacks, that sort of thing?  Or does it basically become "static"?  as in not making any new further ships, doing research, going for colonization, that sort of thing?  I haven't played enough games to really figure out how that works, so I thought I'd ask the people who would actually know.  Much thanks for any information concerning it.