High power laser systems are making their way into more and more industrial applications. From cutting steel, to drilling via holes in silicon, to marking plastic, a whole range of processes now make use of the laser to produce results not previously practical. Advances in fiber lasers in particular, with their scalability, beam quality and wall‐plug efficiency, have made laser beams with powers of many tens of kilowatts a common tool available to commercial users. Even processes requiring more modest power levels often use a high‐power laser system and distribute the beam to multiple lower‐power workstations, to benefit from the resulting process uniformity across a production line.