Interest Survey: Copilot for Exchange Server (On-Premises) (techcommunity.microsoft.com)

Microsoft’s Exchange Team is soliciting feedback via a short survey to gauge interest in bringing Copilot-style AI to Exchange Server in on-premises environments. The announcement signals an exploration — not a release — but it’s a clear indicator that enterprise customers who must keep mail and metadata on-site (for compliance, sovereignty, or latency reasons) might soon get access to generative-assistant capabilities similar to Microsoft Copilot. The team wants to understand customer needs and constraints before moving forward. For the AI/ML community this is significant because on-prem Copilot raises technical and operational questions different from cloud deployments: where models are hosted (local inference vs. hybrid cloud), hardware requirements (GPU/accelerator provisioning), data privacy and residency controls, how mailbox indexing and search will feed models, authentication and access control integration (on-prem Active Directory/Exchange APIs), and parity with cloud Copilot features. Admins will also need deployment, scaling, and patching plans. If pursued, this could broaden enterprise ML adoption by enabling private, compliant generative services over sensitive communications while driving demand for edge/enterprise inference tooling, secure model pipelines, and connectors that bridge on-prem mail flow with LLMs.