When an issue is created through Jira Cloud for Outlook, the Epic link will not give any suggestions that are relevant to the assigned project before the entire Epic link name is typed.
For ex: "AQ2691-9". - It gives results only for this
cannot type for example "AQ" or "2691"

Kindly have suggestions coming up when starting to type the epic name.

Also, having epics from the current project at the top would simplify the search.