Solo tanking in RO:Ost only barely worked, you could do it, but one guy having to perform all actions sepperately does not really reprisent what a real tank should be capable of, tanks did not roll into combat with just one crewmember.
If you had a good player in the tank with you, then it worked, and worked well, but he would have to be a good team player you could communicate with, and who would follow instructions. If he didn't, then it was even worse than tanking Solo, and he would unboubtedly get you both killed.
So tanking only worked as intended when you could find a good teammate, Solo play was not really intended, but unfortunately became the norm.
This is what the AI crew aims to solve, if people are going to Solo tank anyway, and they are, because there will allways be idiots, then they might aswell try to make Solo play work as realistic as possible.
Now as i understand the AI crew, you play as the commander of the tank, and basically, control the whole tank by proxy, the AI doesen't do anything unless you tell them to, you give the orders and they follow them, so it's a lot like team-tanking with competent players, only they are AI instead.
The commander and gunner are also a combined class, which means you will be in charge of aiming and shooting the main gun, along with giving orders, as this accomplishes two things, it gives Solo commanders something fun to do (shoot), and it also prevents having the gunner be an AI Aim-bot, which would be terrible for gameplay, nobody would want that.
Basically, you are in control of the whole tank, the AI is just there to carry out your orders (and your orders will determine the success or failure of the tank, the AI won't just do things by themselves), they are there to simulate that it took more than one person to work a tank, and to simulate that tanks rolled into combat with full crews (even if there is only one human player in them).
Seriously, lets see it in action before we start complaining about it, because on paper it actually sounds like a pretty good system, and if the AI is coded well enough, it's going to work out really well.
And if there are problems with it, you can be damned sure the Beta testers are going to complain about them!