No, he's right. The auto casting isn't going off.

This isn't a big problem for us humans, but does cause a serious problem for the AI.

But I still found Iconus autocasting Extend Shield at every second possible in beta 2c, even it was sitting at the edge of the grav well and leaving my whole fleet struggling with the enemy titan.

Ive noticed the same for autocasting. In a game as the TEC the other day, my command cruisers seemed to have no trouble firing off the Embolden ability but my Hoshikos just sat there looking stupid. There was plenty of repairing to be done but they weren't autocasting the repair ability or the demo bots ability for that matter. After a while they did begin to auto cast it but would ignore certain ships for some reason. For example, I had a Kol that was at about 2/3 health (This is after the battle was over) that was completely ignored by the 8 Hoshikos with me at the time. They were repairing other things and had AM as I was in my own culture and had the first 2 levels of the culture techs researched. There is definitely something screwy with autocasts for some ships.