Industrial production along a digital process chain is part of Industry 4.0. In the future, part fabrication in "Smart Factories" will be driven by low volume production, customization, rapid design adaptations and product innovations instead of tool-based mass production. Additive manufacturing (AM) of polymers will be a future brick in the transformation to "Industry 4.0". Among all 3D printing technologies, powder bed fusion (PBF) technologies such as laser sintering (LS), multi jet fusion (MJF) or high-speed sintering (HSS) are the primary technologies that transfer 3D printing (prototyping) to AM. PBF technologies are highly dependent on process-safe polymer powders in combination with QA measures for process and industrial production. These currently only partially available points are by far the greatest obstacles to the implementation of PBF in industrial production. Polymer powders must have a broad spectrum of specific properties in order to be reliably processed in the LS process. The complex combination of intrinsic and extrinsic powder properties requires complex material development processes and a thorough understanding of the overall system. In addition to the materials, the details of the fusion process are also decisive for the later component properties, since AM is a primary forming process. The great complexity of the material/process interaction is the reason for the lack of materials for industrial purposes. The contribution flash-lights the efforts in the development of further LS materials as well as the corresponding process and machine development in science and industry and tries to take a look into the future, what comes next.